As we come to our time of learning from God's word, I am reminded to announce that children ages four to second grade are dismissed to go to children's worship for age-appropriate time of worship together. If you're here for the first time, there'll be people to greet you out at the welcome desk. And if you prefer to have your children stay with us here in the main hall, you're welcome to do that as well. For those of you who may not know me, I'm Wayne Koch, one of the elders here, and it's my privilege this morning to open the word of truth to you. P.D. is here. He originally wasn't planning to be. There's an installation service at Chapel Gate of a friend that was canceled at the last minute because of impending storm. And Dan Passarelli, who's been ministering in our midst, has returned back to his work, his great work at Chapel Gate and at Metro Baltimore Seminary. So the worship team of Session, together with P.D., are prayerfully pursuing partners for the next series of sermons and the next seasons to work with P.D., who's carrying a great load as the only pastor in our midst and so many responsibilities that he does so faithfully. So pray for us as we seek the Lord in that. It is daunting and humbling to bring the word in the morning service. I'm very mindful of the call to a high standard of correctly handling the word of truth. So if you'd pray with me, I'd appreciate that. Let's pray together. Lord God, we are aware of your presence in our worship. Thank you for that. We thank you for your word that clearly discloses to us much about yourself and about your call to us. As we look at the call to Peter this morning, we pray that you would open our eyes and our ears and our minds to what you have to say. And we pray that you would keep me from error that might cause people to stumble. As we seek to honor you, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. So last summer, before we knew we were gonna go through a transition, you may recall we held an open forum in this hall. I got up and spoke first and asked the question, or reflected the question back, does the leadership of Columbia Presbyterian Church have an agenda? You may remember that. And I offered the answer, as I like to do sometimes. I said, yes, we have an agenda. And the agenda is the Great Commission. It is Jesus' call to the church to serve faithfully for the mission of the church of all time. So as we now are in transition and are preparing for Flourish to come next week and interview a number of us and meet with a session, I thought it was a good time to revisit that charge to the church and to look for new insight in it and for a renewed commitment to resolve to be faithful. We, your leaders, want Columbia Presbyterian Church to be a faithful and fruitful body in the greater church around the world. So listen to the word of God, our passage taken from Matthew chapter 28, which we all know so well if we've been around the church for very long as the Great Commission. Jesus meeting with his disciples and giving them a charge. Now the 11 disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age." This is the word of the Lord. So two observations to start out. First, making disciples, as we see in this passage, is not just about winning individual souls for heaven. We see that in the opening line. Jesus says, all authority on heaven and earth has been given to me. He's talking about his kingly office and his mission when he came to earth was to introduce, to bring in the kingdom of God. And so we in our disciple making are participating in that. And the second point is that it is we that are participating. Jesus said this to all the disciples in a group. They were together. At that point in time, they were the church. And Jesus gave this charge to the church, a community project to be worked on by the community. When we made our last trip to Cameroon, I had a lot of chance to read on the plane, and one of the books I read was one that had been recommended by Rob Gicking. It's a book about handing the church off to the next generation. As we go through our transition, that's very much on our minds, on my mind. We have a challenge and an opportunity here at Columbia Presbyterian. A truly multi-generational church, it's remarkable in that regard. Everyone from little ones to gray hairs are here. And so we have a great opportunity for mentoring. The name of the book that Rob recommended is Growing Young, and the subtitle is Shifting Culture, Shifting Church Culture. to reach a new generation. Let me read that again. Growing young, shifting church culture to reach a new generation. The author is Jacob Rodriguez. He's an apostolic pastor. And in it, he instructs us to look again at the Great Commission, among other things, to be sure that we're applying it faithfully and effectively and correctly. So, Rodriguez says that the Great Commission can be summarized in three words. And we have those three words on a slide. The three words are to believe, become, and belong. You see them there, believe, become, and belong. And he asks, how are you employing those three words at your church? His challenge is that the order in which we expect them to occur makes all the difference in our church culture. And so I asked myself as I was reading, what is the order that we use here at CPC when we welcome and meet new people, that people experience when they come and have their first contact with us? And what does that say about both us and to visitors about how people are introduced to Jesus and grow in faith and find maturity in Christ? So it seemed to me as I thought about it that in many ways at CPC, we have a standard order of these and it's the order that's on this slide. People first believe in Jesus before they come to church. They come to be a part of the community after they come to know him as Lord and Savior. And then, before they meet with the elders, they experience some becoming. How do we become a Christian? Do we take on some of the manifestations of what the Bible teaches so that we're conforming in our lives to the expectations of the community? And then, if you've done those two things, you can meet with the elders. We ask for a credible testimony of how the Lord has worked in your life, both to bring you to faith and to manifest a growing trust in the Lord Christ. And then you can belong. So believe, become, belong. And when you belong, you are brought into fellowship in a full way with all the benefits and responsibilities that most of you in the room already know. But Rodriguez challenges in his book, is that the order of the Great Commission? And if not, how does the fact that we follow that order affect us? So as the title of the sermon says, and I mentioned in my prayer, I thought it a good idea to look at the life and discipleship of Peter as we think about how does Jesus make disciples? There's no one in the Bible that we know more about the discipleship process, I would say, than Peter, that rough fisherman, Simon, who became the rock on which Jesus built his church. There's good reason to say that the reason we know so much about Peter is because of his relationship with John Mark. In 1 Peter 5.13, at his closing, Peter says, greetings from my son Mark. And early church tradition holds that Mark wrote his gospel largely based on Peter's teaching. And then Mark, which is shorter than Matthew and Luke, was used in part perhaps by those writers to write their gospels as well. So I'm gonna read several passages that show Peter's discipling process taken from the Gospels. And the first one is the call to Peter. I'm gonna read the passage from Luke because it's a little fuller than the other two synoptic Gospels. This is from Luke chapter five. On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret. And he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon, he, that's Jesus, of course, asked to be put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch. And Simon answered, Master, we toiled all night and took nothing. But at your word, I will let down the nets. And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish and their nets were breaking. They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord. For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken. And so also were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, do not be afraid. From now on, you will be catching men. And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him. So at this point, Simon was a rough fisherman. He certainly wasn't using apostolic language. As far as we know, he had no rabbinical schooling. And he knew his shortcomings vividly, didn't he? What did he do? He fell down at Jesus' knees and said, depart from me for I'm sinful. But he was impressed by the catch. And you notice the one thing we do know about what happened is that he and the other man left that catch, quite a bit of money probably left on the table, and followed Jesus immediately. And so I would maintain that the scripture shows that right then and there, in a particular way, Peter belonged. He belonged to an inner circle, the group that was going to be close to Jesus. Do you remember what it was like when you first came into contact with Christians? I do. Maybe that's where you are today. Maybe you were invited by a friend or just drove by in the rain and came in to hear what was going on, or maybe you're joining us on livestream and you decided to give it a try. If so, we want to welcome you warmly and to assure you that we all also came with curiosity and probably not a little skepticism when we came to the church. When I first looked at the church community in a serious kind of adult way, it was when I was in high school. I had been raised in a Christian home, but I knew when I came to the youth group at our high school that I didn't belong there. I was trusting in my own efforts to be good enough to make it to heaven, and I knew at the same time that I was blowing it every day. And so I postured. I overcompensated. I went to the youth ministry at my high school and frankly, brothers and sisters, I was obnoxious. I was that guy who knew the five points of Calvinism and was willing to tell everybody who would listen about how smart I was with that. But I had not yet seen my need for Jesus and I wasn't walking the walk of a disciple. What's amazing to me as I look back on that is that those young Christians, those young men and women welcomed me. They put up with me. I was invited to the meetings. I think I was even invited to pray, leading them occasionally. As I look back, it was a most remarkable outpouring of grace. In a way, they had included me. I belonged, even though I didn't belong. So Jesus went on this walkabout, right? So he saw Peter, this rough fisherman, and his companions, and he called them to join something. And right away, they did. How did Jesus then proceed in his disciple making? If you have your Bible and you open to the book of Matthew chapter four and you scroll through the pages on your device or in your book, you'll see how Jesus made disciples. Matthew chapter four gives the account, a shorter version of the account of the call at that fishing expedition. And then immediately, if you've been around, know that five through seven, perhaps you know this is the Sermon on the Mount, an extended period of teaching. In Matthew eight, Peter and the others begin to see healings going on. And Matthew chapter eight is where that remarkable event of the calming of the storm occurs. We read this several weeks ago in scripture. You remember Jesus was asleep in the front of the boat and his disciples were out on the lake and a great storm came up and they were afraid and they said, wake the master up. Jesus, aren't you concerned that we are perishing? And he woke up and with a word calmed the wind and the storm. And what happened? It says that the disciples were more afraid of Jesus then than they had been of the storm. And they said, who is this? They'd been spending time with him, but they didn't know who they were spending time with. It hadn't fully dawned on them yet. In Matthew 9, there's more healing and teaching and even the raising of a girl from the dead. And in Matthew chapter 10, a really remarkable thing happens. Jesus sends these 12 men out. They didn't yet have it together. They didn't even know who he was, but he was including them in his project. He was entrusting them to go out and tell people that the kingdom of God was at hand. After that, in chapter 11, John the Baptist sins from prison to find out if Jesus is the one. And he answers by showing how he is fulfilling prophecy about the Messiah. Then the Pharisees start to challenge him for plucking grain on the Sabbath, for healing a withered arm of a man. And then in Matthew 14, the death of John the Baptist in prison. Things are getting tough to be a disciple of Jesus. more parables and teaching. And then in Matthew 14, this next scenario, the walking on the water. Matthew 14, verse 25. And in the fourth watch of the night, he came to them walking on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified and said, it is a ghost. And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them saying, take heart, it is I, do not be afraid. And Peter answered him, Lord, if it's you, command me to come to you on the water. And he said, come. So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. Peter wanted to be with Jesus. He wanted to be like Jesus. He wanted power. He wanted to participate. And that's good. He wanted to display faith. It was a little bit, I think, like when I knew everything about Calvinism. Let's try this out. But you know the rest of the story. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid. And beginning to sink, he cried out, Lord, save me. Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, oh, you of little faith, why did you doubt? And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased, and those in the boat worshiped him, saying, truly, you are the Son of God. You see, I think Peter was trusting in himself, and the phenomenon, and not really yet Jesus. Hadn't quite figured out who he was dealing with. But after this demonstration of saving power, all of the disciples started to try out this new belief, you're the son of God. Two chapters later, Matthew 16, Jesus seals the deal with Peter. Matthew 16, verse 13. Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, who do people say that the son of man is? And they said, some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. He said to them, but who do you say that I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. Pretty clearly, this is the point, I would say, in the account where Peter believes. So now he's arrived, right? Jesus even gives him a new name. You're Peter, and on this rock, I'm going to build my church. If you know the story, you know very well what happens next. Peter blows it big time. Right away. He still has his own mind about the agenda that Jesus should follow, and when Jesus foretells his suffering and death at the hands of the scribes and the Pharisees, Peter says, far be it from you, Lord, this shall never happen to you. And there follows, I think, the most stunning rebuke in all of scripture. Get behind me, Satan. You're a hindrance to me. For you're not setting your mind on things of God, but on the things of man, doing so well to come crashing down. Has that ever happened to you? Maybe you did something really loving for your spouse, or your parent, or your child one day, or one hour, and then got into an argument with them the next. or a kindness to a brother or a sister and then found yourself telling a story that wasn't very flattering about them a few hours later. Or maybe you gave something to someone generously and then the next day you found yourself like the Levite and the priest in the Good Samaritan parable walking by on the other side. Peter had many bumps in his road of discipleship, epic bumps. He was one of the ones who fell asleep while Jesus was praying at the Garden of Gethsemane. An hour or two later, he cuts off the sword of the high priest's servant's ear and has to be rebuked by Jesus to put away his sword. And then, most remarkable of all, as we look and judge him, which we tend to do, he denies Jesus three times, even though Jesus had warned him that he was gonna do that, and he said, no, it will never happen, three times, even before a lowly servant girl. So, what happened then? After Jesus' resurrection, he gently restores Peter to a place of being in his good graces, in a scene that reconstructs or re-echoes the big catch of fish. Isn't that remarkable? Jesus reminding Peter of his first call at his restoration. Come, Peter, do you love me? Feed my flock. But even after that, Peter gets it wrong again. You know that he received a prayer about eating the food that was forbidden in Jewish dietary law so that Cornelius, the centurion, the Gentile, could feel welcomed into the community of faith. Peter does that, but Paul then later has to rebuke him for pulling back from those who are open for the Gentiles to join. by joining with the Judaizers, those who were in the circumcision party. We know from Galatians chapter two, Paul said, I had to rebuke him. He was wrong. So, do we expect bumps in our discipleship path? Do we expect them for ourselves? For others? For your spouse? Got to stumble once in a while? How about your children or even the pastor or the elders? All of us, brothers and sisters, are somewhere on the road of disciple-making, and maybe, like Peter, we're learning through hard lessons. The Bible gives us one more milestone in Peter's development as a disciple, and it's best seen in his own words from his two letters. So I'm gonna read a portion of 1 Peter and then of 2 Peter, now Peter the Apostle. 1 Peter 1, he writes, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Christ Jesus from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. And this from Peter's experience. In this you rejoice, though for now a little while, if necessary you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you've not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. Mature Peter. after his rocky road, knows three things in this passage. He knows that it's the Holy Spirit who works the miracle of a new life in a Christian, not his own effort. He knows that we're secure in Christ even when trials come and we stumble and fall, trials that test our faith to prove its genuineness. And he knows that faith doesn't honor him, it honors Jesus. 1 Peter, 2 Peter, excuse me, chapter one. I'm gonna start reading in verse five, a little earlier than what's on the slide. 2 Peter. Again, mature Peter writes, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness. and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. Therefore, brothers, Be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election. For if you practice these qualities, you'll never fall. For in this way, there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Therefore, I intend always to remind you of these qualities, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have. So Peter now, I would say, has arrived. The disciple is a disciple maker, a mentor. Remember how we know so much about Peter's story. This is intriguing. We know it because he told John Mark about it. All those bad stories, falling apart in front of a servant girl, sinking in the water. What an encouragement for John Mark. What an encouragement for us. that this great leader of the church let us see his passage in growth and maturity. So I ask you, do you have a mentor? Or are you mentoring someone? Here at CPC, we have great opportunity, as I said before, for that. Years ago, Elmer Dortsbach was an emeritus pastor on our staff. He and Marjorie lived over in the Potter's House, and they had somehow identified me as somebody to spend some time with and invited me to start coming to their house. So I went, I think monthly, for quite a while, maybe a year, and had breakfast with Marjorie and Elmer. I learned there that if the last waffle burns in the waffle grid, it's because you're done eating. That was Marjorie's wisdom. Elmer walked me through the Westminster Confession of Faith, but he also told me about their early years of marriage, how he moved Marjorie into their first apartment on his bicycle, things like that. He did more than just those things. He let me come with him. Elmer was going out to some of the retirement communities, visiting and preaching, and he took me along. I think it was the third time we were at one of the retirement communities. Elmer said, well, you know, Wayne, I'm not going to be able to be here next month, so I want you to preach. Threw me into the deep end, he did. I don't remember what I said. I'm sure it wasn't very good, but the folks at the community were gracious. I'm not even sure that Elmer really couldn't make it that month. I think he was just a really good mentor. And so, that was part of my growing in maturity, helped by Elmer. Do you long for maturity? You do well. If you do, how do you pursue it? How do we pursue helping one another here at Columbia Presbyterian Church? I asked, how did Peter get there? Peter got there very clearly by spending a lot of time with Jesus. And you say, well, we can't do that. Yes, we can. We have all of this testimony, much of which we've just read, about what happened in those days when the disciples walked with Jesus. We can spend time in the scriptures. We can pray without ceasing and ask the Holy Spirit to give us his perspective on the events in our lives. And in this way, God provides for us the same experience of training and discipling that Peter enjoyed. So we expect that the work of the Holy Spirit also will be part of restoring us, loving us when we've stumbled. We learn that way to trust in his work and not our own for his glory and praise. So there's another slide with the three Bs going back to the book about growing young. And remember our order that I proposed was believe, become, belong. Is that the order of the Great Commission? I think we see from what we've been reading about Peter that in some ways, Peter belonged before he believed. He was invited and welcomed into a community of people. Is this the order of the Great Commission to belong and then believe and then become? We are told to go out and make disciples. That is to welcome and invite people into the community. And then when the Holy Spirit's acted, to baptize them and then teach. Disciple-making doesn't end with a believer's prayer. You're not a disciple when you sign a card or walk to the front or all the things that we do to say, now I trust in the Lord. You have much of your path of discipleship still to go. Now, I'm not advocating that we change how we take members into membership here at Columbia Presbyterian Church, don't get me wrong. Peter's story doesn't really instruct us in that aspect of things. If you think about it, there were no other mature believers other than Jesus at the time that Peter was being discipled. So we don't know how Peter would have been incorporated into a church at the time. We don't get a lot of help from looking at other New Testament figures. There was no way that Saul of Tarsus was gonna be warmly welcomed into the community of believers while he was tracking them down to arrest them. Saul had to meet Jesus on the road to Damascus and at least begin to believe. But remember what happened next. He was warmly welcomed. by a really supernatural grace shown by Ananias and the others, even when he was still, they thought, their enemy. Even Judas Iscariot was included among the disciples. One of the sort of clues we have as to how much he was included is that he's the one, remember, that held the money. So people trusted Judas. and he was part of that group until he declared and absented himself from it. So the challenge I think that Rodriguez gives in the book and that I want to pass on to you this morning is, how do we craft a culture here at Columbia Presbyterian Church that reflects Jesus' culture in fulfilling the Great Commission? Question for you, are you out meeting people? Do you start the Great Commission? Go, meet people, make disciples. Randy Pope, the former pastor of Perimeter Church in Atlanta, Georgia, suggests that we can meet people where we work, play, and live. Do you look for people to meet where you work, play, and live? Remember, Jesus found Zacchaeus and Matthew tax collectors, pariahs of the culture. He said, it's the sick who have need of a doctor. And he said, the son of man came to seek and save the lost. Paul testifies that the Lord sent him out to those who are far off, to the Gentiles. And he tells us that Jesus died for us while we were still enemies. So I wonder, does our front door, our outward first impression that we give, tell people that they need to have their act cleaned up before they can enter? Instead of, we want to get to know you and to find out what's important to you and to learn how we can be your friend and be of help and care for you. If we follow Jesus' example, brothers and sisters, the disciples that we find often won't be where we expect. They'll be among the outcasts, the strangers, people who you might think would be the last to come to church. Next question, when we meet someone, is there a place where we can make them feel like they can belong, where they can be invited in? That might be difficult in the morning service, but it might be easier in your home at your community group. or in the young people or the adult male and female adult fellowship groups, basketball, other places. Let people come and be associated with us. Is our language from the pulpit or amongst ourselves parochial? dense, jargon-filled, strange. Does it have to be? Good thing to think about as we look for being open in the Great Commission. When people come here, are they warmly greeted? Morning service before and after is a great time to greet your friends, but do we look around and find people who we don't know and include them in a circle of friends? And then how can we be like Jesus and get people involved and immersed in what we're doing before they even believe? Jesus' pattern was to teach, to show, and then remember he sent the disciples out before they were fully catechized. There's a jargon word for you, right? Before they really had learned anything about what he was about. Can new friends participate in things like Elevate and Root One Day Center or other types of service among us? I think they can. People will keep coming back if they identify and find common interest and have a sense that they are accepted and belong here. So here the word belong is more about being embraced as a friend and welcomed than it is about the official membership in the church. Flourish is coming next week to meet with us and interview some of you, and then one of the next things they'll do is to establish a vision committee. The vision committee's purpose is to study our area around us and find opportunities for us, strategies for us, to find disciples where we work, play, and live. And then the next question is, do we look with expectation, hopeful expectation, that the Holy Spirit will spark belief and respond, that people will respond and be baptized? Do we expect after that that there'll be youthful mistakes and rejoice when we can restore people after those youthful mistakes? Even your elders make mistakes, sometimes epic mistakes, like Peter the Apostle. Next Sunday, Flourish is meeting with us and challenging us to identify pride in our lives and repent of it. I went through a six-page list of all the attributes and situations in which one can identify pride. The brother here has a lot to repent of and be praying about. So would you pray with us, your leaders, as we work through that? We are all still a work in progress. So as I close, I challenge us to reaffirm our agenda, the Great Commission, to go and find and make new friends who can be disciples. And remember that we're all still disciples on a path of growth, immersing ourselves in time with Jesus, listening, watching, trusting, and loving him. And then consider our culture. Is our church culture Jesus culture? Is it marked by warm acceptance of new friends? Loving forgiveness and restoration of those who stumble? Hopeful anticipation. Our children are members, they belong here, but they're not yet believers, many of them. But we look to them with hopeful anticipation that the Holy Spirit will work in them. We can apply that to friends that we meet as well. And then, generous, selfless mentoring. Spending time with one another. Handing off to a generation. all for his glory, working together, not for individual souls in heaven, but for the kingdom to come. Let's pray together. Lord Jesus, you are the King of kings and Lord of lords, and we worship you. We thank you for these insights into your work among us, into your goals for us, into your promises for us, into the way the Holy Spirit keeps us and grows us even through stumbles and falls. Would you help us in these weeks and months to come as we go through transition and meet with flourish to have new insight about our mission to go and make disciples, that we might be a shining light to the praise of your glory here in Columbia. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.