Northside Church - Sydney
Ditto Week 6: Walking as Jesus Walked
I'm listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. I thought show and tell time tonight. I haven't done show and tell before, but I wanted to show you my Jesus action figure. He's really cool, he sits on my desk. Mint condition, mint condition, haven't even opened up the packages, and beautiful, you'd like to know this, he comes with poseable arms and a gliding action as well, which is awesome, which is unreal, but it's not for the figurina such that I love it on my desk. It's more for the commentary on the back of this scene, there's a whole commentary here, it's just fantastic, have a listen to this. The name Jesus means God saves. The term Christ is a title for anointed for God, for Muslims and for some Jews, Jesus was a prophet, but to say he was enlightened, Hindus call him an avatar, and Christians hail him as the son of God, so who was he? I'm going to leave that there for you guys to ponder tonight, and admire, Jesus is with me tonight in more ways than one, which is cool, and so who was he? You see there's actually a deeper response to that question that has life altering consequences, if we're real. I mean how you answer that will dictate whether Jesus for you just remains an action figure tonight with poseable arms and a gliding action, or he becomes the savior of the world. Why? Because we've been going through this series called Ditto, and we've been really looking at the heart of this series, this phrase that says that our Christology shapes our mission. That's fancy funny church words for this, that how you see Jesus affects whether or not you will be like Jesus. What is remarkable about this guy, and why people are making action figures out of him today, 2000 years later, is that because this guy from the life that he lived took 12 ordinary ragtag bunch of Jewish boys, and he turned the world upside down with them, and he turned this world on its head, and still the biggest religion in the world today, according to most sites with 2.1 billion people that call themselves Jesus followers, anecdotally people are saying it's the fastest growing religion in the world. How? Because he was an action figure? No, because anyone of his followers who claims to live in him must walk as Jesus walked, and there must have been something about this guy's life, not just the gliding action, that inspired people, and changed people, and transformed people, and gave them a courage and a strength, and something about them that turned this world upside down, right? And so, all of that really began with two invitations that we're going to see from the Word of God tonight, two invitations in this passage from John chapter 1, verse 35 onwards. It says the next day John was there again with two of his disciples, it's talking about John the Baptist, and when he saw Jesus passing by he said, "Look the Lamb of God," and when the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus, and turning around Jesus saw them following him and asked, "What do you want?" They said, "Rabbi," which means teacher, "Where are you staying?" "Come," he replied, "and you will see, come and see." And so they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent the day with him, and it was about the tenth hour, and Andrew Simon Peter's brother was one of the two who had heard what John had said, and who would follow Jesus, and the first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him we've found the Messiah, that is the Christ, and he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, "You are Simon, son of John, you'll be called Cephas," which when translated is Peter, and the next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee, finding Philip, and he said to him, "Follow me." Come and see, follow me. Two decisions that turn the world upside down, and what we have to understand guys is you can Google map this place, you can Google map the Sea of Galilee, it's a place in real space and time, Christianity is not some figment of someone's imagination because they got inspired and had a dream, it's a real place, and it happened in real space and time. We got asked the question, "What is this action figure doing here in the world?" I spoke a couple of weeks back in the very first series. If you weren't with us, my uncle had a real problem, and that is that he's engine just about seized up in his Toyota Camry, and when he took it to my cousin the mechanic, it went and showed my cousin, my cousin was furious with him because he hadn't replaced the oil for three years, and my cousin was furious, he said, "What are you doing, what did you do that for? Are you crazy?" My uncle said, "I haven't read the operating manual." That's no excuse, and as a result his engine just about clapped it in, and I asked that question, "What if there was an ultimate operating manual for the human life?" What if there was this ultimate operating manual? It could have be that the pains and the seizing up of some aspect of your life is not just because of bad luck, but because you like that Toyota Camry and not operating in accordance with the owner's manual. You see, what was Jesus doing here on earth? What was he's doing? If the whole aim of the biblical story, people say, "Oh, he came to die for the forgiveness of sins," and that's a very good Christian answer. Very good. I'll give you a gold star, but that's not it. If that was the case, we would have just killed him as a baby, right? Child sacrifice on the older. It's all done. Now what I said, day one, day one is that Jesus came not just to reconcile us to God and to die for the forgiveness of our sins, but to show us how life was really meant to be lived. And so in that sense, unfortunately, many people look at his life and go, "Look, he did that because he was God. He did that because he was Jesus. You know, he had to be good, he had to be a good person." And what we've been learning is that we often can misunderstand the very core truth of Christianity and that it's this, that Jesus was not just a teacher and Jesus was not just a prophet and Jesus was not just a wise man. He was all of those things, of course, but Jesus was God. Jesus was God who became a man, you know, Ryrie, the theologian, said, "Never listen, God. He was never more than man." You know, Jesus veiled his divinity in order to live out his humanity. That's what he was doing here. He was showing us how life was meant to be lived. And so in that sense, if we learn and we've seen throughout this series, Dido, that Jesus did what he did, not as God playing tricks, but as a human, then Jesus' model for life can be our model for life, in that sense, right? And so in being our model, we learned that he had like six core priorities in his life. I've been taking you through a secret acrostic, it seems to be my current theme at the moment in preaching acrostic. So when you take a certain word and you write it down the side of a page, and you can do that right now if you've been tracking in this, in the series, because this series we've seen the priorities in Jesus' life was he had, he lived a life of Holy Spirit power. You write down that standard, that's you writing it down the side of your page right now. And you see, he depended on the Holy Spirit. You know, we get confused about the Holy Spirit, but I always just say the Holy Spirit is the string between the two Milo tins that were God, the Father, and Jesus. Does that make sense? You ever do that as a kid when you had the Milo tins, you could talk to each other? Hello? You see, and so the Holy Spirit allowed Jesus to communicate with God and the Holy Spirit allows us today to communicate with God without that tension on the string and the relationship. We can't communicate with him. But he also prayed. Jesus always withdrew to lonely places and prayed, Luke 5, 16. And Jesus understood that prayer wasn't just a religious thing that people do, the Christians do, but that it was a resource of power in his life. The "O" was for his obedience to God's agenda. We saw that Jesus was forever telling everyone else that this was not his idea. Talk about shifting the blame. This whole God thing was not his idea, the Father's idea. What we saw in Jesus at the cross was the reality of life. If you want to endure suffering, if you want to have the resources to endure suffering, then you need to have an agenda that's bigger than your own. Jesus had an agenda, a picture of the world that was far bigger than his own, and he suffered for it. The "W" was for the word of God. His language was so bib line. It's not actually a word. Someone asked me throughout the series. That's not actually a word. So I don't look it up. I made it up. It meant that the word of God just spilt out from him and he spoke it and he talked it, and it was just part of his life in that sense. The "E" was that he constantly exalted the Father. He worshiped God, not just on Sundays, but 24/7. And then the "R", the "R", that's what we get to tonight finally. See, this is the genius of Jesus right here, the "R". You ready for it? Think about the strategy of Jesus. The incredible miracle of this incredible message that God cares about the world and he loves the world and he loves the world so much that he's going to enter the world as a man and be a little baby like we saw Hugo tonight. And he's going to grow up and he's going to preach this message and he's going to turn this world upside down with hope and love and light. What's amazing is that he did it relationally. He did it through people. I mean, Jesus didn't leave a textbook for his followers, did he? He left a community. And he knew that if he left a community of people that he'd done life with, they'd eventually write a textbook, we call it the Bible. You can read it later on if you want. And you see, you need to understand the difference between that because the difference between those two strategies, the relational and the theological, is the difference between two totally different types of religion. You know, I call the relational Christianity, I call the other "crustianity". And that's not Christianity in New Zealand, if you get what I'm saying. We get confused with "crustianity". We think Christianity is "crustianity" that it's adherence to these set of beliefs and right beliefs and doctrine and sound religious principles, but it's not that. There was never what Jesus was about, it was to be Christianity simply a follower of him. So, Christianity on the other hand is not adhering to strict beliefs, but it's responding to these two calls or appeals from Jesus that he gives us tonight, every single one of us. The first one is this, "come and see". You know, we're a city-based church, we see buskers around, you know, down at the key all the time, we see them down there, they're doing all sorts of cool tricks. And have you ever noticed how you end up at a busker? Or you hear some faint music and you see the crowd, don't you? And you don't even see what the busker is doing in the first place. You just turn up and then you push through the crowd and say, "I have some guys following swords again, that's cool, I'm moving on". But you know how that with buskers, there's a level of intrigue, right? What's interesting, when you read through the Bible, you will see with Jesus Christ that there is always some level of busker intrigue with him. People are always seeing from the crowds and from a distance, there was some intrigue with him. And that's what this passage was showing us that in the beginning, the world's first Christians, they were just curious. They were Jewish boys to begin with in this passage, they were John the Baptist disciples, they weren't Christians yet, they hadn't decided to follow Jesus. And so we see that Jesus is offering not some new spirituality or some new form of religion. You know what we see this in here in the way that he operates is that it's not spirituality and it's not religion because when you encounter Jesus, you encounter a person, not religious practices. And so as a result, you know, John the Baptist before he doesn't say, "Look, here's the pathway to enlightenment." And look, here's the principle of how to be a really good person. You know, Jesus is neither spirituality, he's neither religion, he's a person. You know what people do? You know what people do? They say things like this, verse 37, "What do you want?" If I was trying to start a worldwide movement, I'd probably think of a more sort of nice phrase, wouldn't you? Instead of what do you want, these guys were following him and he said, "What do you want?" And I was like, "Jesus was God," he probably had that sense of already what these guys wanted. Do you think it was for Jesus' benefit? No, he was saying it for their benefit because, you know, these disciples, they were following Jesus for all sorts of reasons. After the Messiah, it's the one that's going to come back, he's going to save us from slavery, he's going to do all sorts of stuff, he's going to kick out the Romans, he's going to punch him, he's going to, there's none of that sort of stuff. He asked him because they were seeking Jesus for all sorts of reasons and what it shows us tonight is when you first encounter him, you can seek Jesus for all sorts of reasons. It's a cool thing to do, might feel a bit guilty, so I'd better get into the religion thing. I want to feel right, I want to feel a bit superior and, you know, it's just a resolution I want to make in my life to feel a bit better, but, you know, well, this is what I love that in light of these misconceptions that these guys had, listen to what Jesus' response is, he says, "Come and you will see." He says, "Just come hang out with me." If you're intrigued, if you're curious, if you're not sure, if you think, you know, you've got all these concepts about who I am, just come and hang out with me, and so here's the point. When you first encounter Jesus, you will have all sorts of ideas about who he is, and that's okay. Just come and see. That's the first decision. Come and see. The second one that we need to make tonight when we encounter Jesus Christ is the second one he says, "Come and follow," verse 43, it says, "The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee and finding Philip. He said to him, 'Follow me.'" You know, "To follow means it's a decision to no longer observe anymore." You know, if Jesus is a person and not religious principles, it won't work just to observe him. It can't work that way. You know, you can observe a principle, a principle is not going to call you to anything. An action figure is not going to call you to anything. That guy's sat on my desk for about three months and he really hasn't transformed me all that much yet because principles or action figures, they don't call you into anything but people do. And Jesus was a person in that sense. He's constantly creating these moments of decisions that's going to require a shift on your part. You can't sort of be like the back passage of this action figure thing and have some sort of stance outside of who he really is. He's always so narrow-minded, always asking people, "Who do you say I am?" And so in that sense, you know, you have to make a decision to follow. I've said this before, the best place you see this is kids in the toy section, right? Dan and Kate are going to have to endure this when Hugo gets a little bit older. But, you know, you've got to wooly's. You ever seen little toddlers in the toy section? You can't get them out of there. You head down there and they're all fine and they're walking along with you all right and then they're mesmerized, they're transfixed, like little girls, they see Barbie sitting right there. Oh, it's Barbie. And they sort of reach out and, you know, look, you've probably been there, you've probably been a parent yourself, you know, where you said, "Come on, time to go." And it's that dreaded feeling is that poor kid has to make that decision right. Mom or Barbie, Mom or Barbie, Mom or Barbie. Look, in that sense, when we hear Jesus Christ through the Word of God tonight to say, "Come and follow," He stands like a parent at the end of that aisle there and He calls us away from the Barbie doll distractions of our life. Sometimes there are so many things that catch our eyes that we think are going to be good for us and are going to be fun and it's nothing compared to the life that He's calling us into. And so, guys, the decision between coming and seeing, coming and following is a big one because on one hand, it's okay just to sit and check Him out for a bit. We want to encourage that in that church, in this church, just come and check Him out. But some of you might have been sitting through this six-week series learning all about the life of Jesus and His core priorities and the power of principles and all He did and look at His life and saying, "It's amazing." But tonight, He finally calls you and He says, "Come and follow." Common follow, it shows us His principle is not that, you know, like religion, you're all to just go and do it, but He says, "Come and learn from me and I will show you how to do it. I'll show you how to live this life. I'll teach you how to live this life." How? Well, here's one I prepared earlier. You see, the four guys, the guys that He's talking about, the twelve that turned the world upside down, they wrote it down in a book. They made the textbook once, He was done to say, "This is what we learn of Him. This is how we change the world," and they gave us His model for life. So we've spent six weeks, me personally, falling more in love with Jesus, more in awe of Jesus, of the incredible guy that He is. And yet tonight, I feel like for each and every one of us in this place, whether we're a believer or not, we can't escape, unlike an action figure that will sit on my desk for the rest of my time here at Northside, Jesus, we can't avoid Him. He calls us into something, He calls us to make a decision tonight, come and see or come and follow. You see, here's the beauty. After two and a half years, the Bible says in Acts 5 that the disciples filled Jerusalem. After four and a half years, Acts 9 says they were literally multiplying churches through the countryside. 18 years later in Acts 17, it starts to turn the Roman Empire upside down. 28 years later, begins turning the world upside down, 2,000 years later, well, we're here tonight, don't we? Guys, it was all done relationally, not theologically. You can't take this stuff and just let it be in your head any longer. Jesus calls you to come and see or to come and follow. Jesus made disciples who made disciples who made disciples who made disciples. It's not some construction of a dream. He took an ordinary bunch of guides and he says, now you've seen that what I've done, go and do likewise, follow my model for life and even if you have enough faith, even you might even do greater things that I've done here on this earth. The friends, that's great. That's great news and great hope for the city of Sydney, right? You and me ordinary people simply called to do ditto, to walk as Jesus walked. And so, where do you sit tonight? You are asking the same sort of questions that the back of my action figure box is asking you tonight. That's cool. I just want to encourage you to come and see. Come and hang out with us. Come and see who Jesus is. It's, you can have all sorts of notions about him, it's okay, just come and see. But some of you tonight, seeing his life, you want a bit of that. His love, his mercy, his grace, the way that he lived, his relaxed nature, everything about him, you know, he calls in a night to come and follow. When you do that, you can, to replace your faith in him.