People are the measuring stick of how you're doing with God. It's very easy to be drawn into all range of spiritual experiences and these are wonderful, but if it doesn't convert to being connected to people and working with people and helping people, there is something majorly lacking. If you engage with Jesus, with Him and His work, you will discover the true identity and call of God on your life. If you focus on using God just to get your needs and whatever met, He said you'll end up inward-looking and non productive. You'll actually lose your life. Learn how to hear His voice, and then choose to consistently say yes, and respond by doing something
I want to share with you something that would be extremely helpful for you, and I'm going to ask you to do something at the end of this too, which will be even better still, so I'll tell you in a moment what I'm going to ask you to do. Let's pick up where we're on. We're talking about following Jesus, and the Bible doesn't talk about coming to meetings, it talks about following Jesus. Coming to meetings and gatherings, it talks about not forsaking gathering together, or being gathered together; but the primary focus of Jesus' ministry was that we would engage Him and follow Him, so we'll pick up our key verse we were looking at which was found in Mark 1, and Jesus spoke to some of the disciples.
This is what He said to them here, He said to Simon and Andrew, his brother, who were casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen, and Jesus said to them: follow Me, I will make you become fishers of men; and immediately they left their nets and followed Him. Every one of us is called to be connected to Jesus and to follow Him. We talked about many, many things that people follow today, and you could be following the trends, following the fashion, following the world. You could be following the Middle East, you could be following lots of things; but ultimately many of these things lead to all kinds of pressures that we don't need. We are called to follow Jesus Christ, and we want to talk about what that would look like, following Jesus. I mean in those days there, there He was, He said: follow Me; and you just came up and followed Him; but there was always a price for it, so last week we shared on, in following Jesus, you will be caught up into what He's caught up in. There is no way you can follow Jesus Christ without being changed, and starting to shift in your values; what's important, what isn't important. When you begin to follow Jesus Christ, your whole value system begins to shift. It shifts because He will lead you somewhere you've never even thought of going; and the Bible says in this verse here, it says: I will make you fishers of men; so there's one thing absolutely certain, that when we follow Jesus Christ, He will teach us how to be a lover of God, but a lover of people. You can measure how spiritual you are, not by how many visions and dreams you have, but whether you actually overflow and love people, and connect with them and help them.
People are the measuring stick of how you're doing with God. It's very easy to be drawn into all range of spiritual experiences, and these are wonderful; but if it doesn't convert to being connected to people, and working with people and helping people, there is something majorly lacking. So that's where we start, that's where we got to, and we shared a little bit about how we seem to have a generation which is fairly precious. Last week we talked about the Princess Syndrome, and how many people are just wanting to look after themselves, fuss over themselves; and in doing that, Jesus said: you can't be My disciple, unless you deny self, take up your cross, follow Me. In other words, He's saying very simply this: I'm called to something much bigger than looking after myself. He said: I am called to change the world, and changing the world will involve Me suffering, dying, going to the cross. Peter's response was: don't even think of doing that; and Jesus said: listen, if you don't actually deal with this issue of self-interest, and embrace the difficulties and hardships accompanied with My mission, you can't be a follower of Me.
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