So if you've hunted for a job recently, if you remember the last time you did, you're acutely aware of the fact that employers are looking for highly qualified people, only qualified people. And the more important a position, the higher the qualifications. If you want to pastor a church, you basically have to walk on water, pretty much. In fact, Jesus wouldn't be qualified to pastor a lot of churches because he didn't have a degree. Churches don't find very many people to be qualified, but they find a lot of people to be unqualified. The congregation at North Hamden Church found Jonathan Edwards unfit to be their pastor. After he was there for 10 years, they voted him out. The vote was 10 to 1 against Edwards. So that church was just absolutely certain that one of the greatest theologians and preachers of their century was unfit to be their pastor. John Calvin, same thing. He was found unfit to even live in Geneva. They ran him out of town. I know people who don't know of a single pastor who's qualified. You talk to them, it doesn't matter who you mention, John MacArthur, John Piper, R.C. Sproul, whatever, all of them are unqualified. The Corinthians Church found the Apostle Paul unfit to be a leader for them. How many of you have been found unfit by an employer or a potential employer? Some of us have been found unfit not only by employers, but friends or family even. Unfit to even be someone's friend or to have a place in their life. unfit to even be on their Facebook friends list, which, I mean, what is there in life less important than being on a Facebook, being a Facebook friend, and still you're not even fit to be on their list of 500 names on their list. One thing that comes very naturally to us is spotting disqualifying flaws in other people. Some people are just pros at that. They find disqualifying flaws in everyone. And that's sad because it's a horrible way to live because they just isolate themselves. Although, if you're an employer, you have to do that to some degree, right? You have to look for, you have to be alert to disqualifying flaws because you've got to get good enough help. If you're going to stay in business as an employer, you've got to have good enough help. My boss just the other day was telling me how hard it is to find people who can do my job. which is amazing because it's the simplest job. It takes one week to train, fully train, for my job. Anybody can just do it. And he's having a hard time finding people qualified. Imagine if you were the hiring manager tasked with finding qualified applicants for the position of apostle. What kind of qualities would you look for? Someone who could be trusted after Jesus leaves the earth with the task of taking a teaching that has been utterly rejected by everybody and propagate that teaching around the world. And develop and oversee an organization that would persist for thousands of years all the way until the Second Coming. Oh, and in their spare time to write the Bible. What kind of, I mean, that job, and that's the job description. The work conditions are persecution, imprisonment, torture, and the retirement plan is to be martyred. And you gotta fill 12 openings. What kind of qualifications would you look for? If you're trying to find 12 guys that could do that. That was Jesus' task this day up on the mountain. He climbs up there, gets down on his knees, starts praying. Gets dark, 9 o'clock, 10, 11.30, midnight goes by, 2 in the morning, 3 in the mornings, 5, 6, finally the sun's coming up. He prays all night. Sun comes up, gets off the ground, summons all his disciples, and then he starts picking 12. He starts calling names. Simon, come on up. Where's your brother? Andrew, come. James, John, you guys, come on. Philip, whatever, and he just goes through and he calls 12. Well, how did that work out? Well, it's the greatest success story ever. These 12 men, at the beginning of the book of Acts, you get this small number of Christians gathered in a house, in a room in Judea or Jerusalem. Now, 2,000 years later, there are millions of us scattered all over the world devoting our lives to following every word that these 12 men wrote. skip ahead to the book of Revelation and you get this vast multitude that no one can count from every tribe and every tongue and every nation and every language before the throne of God worshipping Him all through the ministry of these 12. How did that happen? Well, we left off last week with Mark telling us in verses 14 and 15 what Jesus' purposes were in appointing the Twelve, the three reasons. Actually, there was a fourth one implied. Then, starting in verse 16, he just gives us a list of names. Twenty years ago, I did a series, a five-part sermon series on each one of these men, going through, summarizing what Scripture says. I'm not going to do that this time, because what I want to just focus on here, for our purposes, is Mark's message. What is Mark trying to get across? What does he want us to think about this list of names? And the first thing that stands out in Mark's list is the primacy of Peter and the name change. The twelve apostles are listed four times in the Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Acts. In those lists, they vary. The order of the names will vary, but Peter is always first and Judas is always last. And it's kind of interesting, there's three groups. Group one always has the same four names, group two has the same four, and group three always has the same four. The order will change inside the group, but they always stay in their group. And the first name of each group is always the same. So Peter's always first in group one, Philip in two, and James, the son of Alphaeus, in group three. They seem to be the predominant person or the leader of each of those little groups. And Peter emerges not just as the leader of the first group, but as the leader of the twelve. In many ways, Peter stood for the whole group, all twelve disciples. He spoke for the whole group many times. He was rebuked for the whole group on certain occasions. He represented the group, and he represented I would suggest not only them as apostles, but he also represented them in their role as disciples, which means, I believe, Peter is, in Scripture, representing all Christians. which explains why we see Peter's name so often in the Bible. We know more about Peter than all other 11 put together. In fact, do you know that Peter's name is mentioned more times in the New Testament than any other name except for Jesus? He's the number two person after Jesus. The Holy Spirit definitely wants us to know a lot about this man. Why? Why? Is it because Peter's life is so exemplary that God gave us a lot of information so we could follow his example? I don't think so. That is the case for Paul. We know that's the case for Paul. We're supposed to follow his example, but I don't think the main purpose of all the information about Peter is for example, because most of the information, so much of the information we have about Peter is bad. It's negative. It's things that he does wrong. Peter does a lot of terrible stuff. Peter is rebuked more harshly by Jesus than any other disciple. Peter is the only disciple who rebukes Jesus. He actually tries to prevent Jesus from going to the cross. Jesus ended up having to call him Satan. That's not a good example. Peter was a coward. His cowardice led him to publicly swear that he didn't even know Jesus three times. That's the worst example there is. And then after Jesus restores him from that act of cowardice, later on he falls into another act of cowardice in Galatians 2, where he's afraid of the men from James, ends up falling into an error that not only leads him astray, but he leads Barnabas and others astray. So Paul ends up having to rebuke Peter to his face. Peter has the distinction of being the only person ever in history to be personally rebuked by both Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul. Then in Acts 10.15, Peter is rebuked directly by God. After God told him to do something, Peter said no to a direct command. Peter was cowardly, argumentative, stubborn, rash, impetuous, prideful, foolish, spoke without thinking. His mind, Jesus said, was on earthly things instead of on God. He was disobedient, slow to understand what Jesus taught. Just a walking bundle of habitual failure. By any standard, I think one thing you'd say about Peter is he's definitely not qualified for church leadership, or any kind of leadership. If you look at the list of qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 for an elder, Peter doesn't even come close. Above reproach? No. Temperate? No. Not violent but gentle? He cut off Malachi's ear at the arrest. Not quarrelsome? He argued with Jesus and God the Father. Not a recent convert or he might become conceited. He was a recent convert and he did become conceited. Good reputation so he won't fall into disgrace in the devil's trap. Terrible reputation. His failure and sin and denial of Christ is one of the most well-known facts of history. Awful reputation. And he did fall into disgrace in the devil's trap. He was about as unqualified as they come. So all that to say, I don't think the information about Peter is put in Scripture so that we can follow his example for holy living. The reason Peter dominates the pages of the New Testament is not so we can follow this example, it's so that we can learn from the way that Jesus dealt with Peter. And in many ways, that's true of all 12 of the apostles, The information about them, in the Gospels especially, is to show how Jesus deals with unqualified people. That's why it's so important that we see their failures. That's why so much of the information in the Gospels is negative. When you read Mark, keep in mind who Mark was written to. It's written to people who only knew the apostles as spiritual giants, right? Great men. For you and me, we are first introduced to the Apostles in the Gospels, right? And we see them kind of as bumblers and then they come around. Mark was written 40 years after Jesus' death. So the readers of the book of Mark were people who had only known the Apostles as spiritual giants, as leaders. The Apostles who were still alive at the time that Mark was written were old men They had led the church as apostles for decades. These people had seen their signs and wonders. They'd seen the apostles' spiritual maturity, their leadership, they'd heard their preaching. These were the greatest men these people had ever known, and they would have been in awe of the apostles. whatever spiritual leader you can think of that you're most impressed with, you know, in our day or in church history, whether it's some preacher today or the Reformers or Spurgeon or Moody or Augustine or whoever it is. I mean, they're bumblers compared to what the apostles were like around late 60s AD when Mark was written. And that was the only perspective the people at that time had of the apostles. So the gospel writers, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, write the accounts and they say, you're not going to believe what these guys were like when Jesus first called them. You've got to know what they were like at the beginning. And so you read about these 12 klutzes who, in the Gospels, many times they almost seem like lost causes, like they're hopeless. For a long time, even the powerful preaching of Jesus Christ doesn't seem to even penetrate their hearts. And so we're back to the question, remember Doug asked a couple weeks ago, what made the change? When did the change happen and what made the change? And that's what I'd like to talk about tonight. And we can answer that a number of ways in Scripture, but since we're studying Mark, we're just gonna look where he points us. So look back at verse 17, Mark 3, 17. The very first thing Mark wants us to know about this list is the renaming of Simon. That's the first thing he says. He tells us that even before he mentions Simon's name. You can't really notice that in the NIV, but in the Greek it's, he appointed 12 and he gave the name Simon, or he gave the name to Simon, Peter. So, Jesus renames Simon. gives him a new name. And it had actually already happened prior to this. It happened back when Jesus first met Peter. John tells us that in John 1.41. So Andrew was the first one to come to Jesus in John 1. And then Andrew right away goes and finds his brother. And it says, first thing Andrew did was find his brother Simon and tell him, we found the Messiah, that is the Christ. And he brought him to Jesus and Jesus looked at him and said, you are Simon, son of John. You will be called Cephas, which when translated is Peter. So Cephas is an Aramaic word, Aramaic name meaning rock. The Greek word for rock is Petros, Peter. But interesting, that's not a name. It wasn't a name. There's no record anywhere in history of anybody being named Petros prior to this. Peter was just a normal Greek word for rock. If some kids were throwing rocks into the lake, they were throwing Peters into the lake. It's just a word for rock. It wasn't a name. After the life of this apostle, rock became a name. Peter, the parents started naming their kids Peter, but nobody before this time. So Jesus meets Peter. He immediately gives him a new name. He renames him. Now normally when you meet someone for the first time and you're introducing yourself, you don't do that. You tell them your name. You don't tell them their name, right? Jesus did it the other way around. Immediately he meets Peter. Hello, pleased to meet you. Your name is Rocky. No it's not, it's Simon. Used to be Simon, now it's Rocky. From now on, you're the Rock. No, that's Dwayne Johnson. No, it's you. You're the Rock. That's your new name. Get used to it. And Jesus does that as soon as he meets Peter. And just kind of an interesting side note, it's the Gentile form of that name that caught on. So the Jewish way of saying Rock is Cephas. That's the Aramaic word. That's the Jewish way to say it. And Cephas was a known name back then. The Greek form wasn't a name, but it's that Greek form, Petros, that caught on. That's what everybody started calling Peter. 96 times in the Gospels we see the name Peter. One time we see Cephas, and it was that verse I just read. In Acts, the book of Acts, Peter occurs 71 times, Cephas zero. And when he introduces himself in 1 and 2 Peter, he introduces himself as Peter. So all that to say, the leader of the 12 ends up with a Gentile name, which is interesting. His old name, Simon, was a very Jewish name. In fact, the name Simon happens to be the most common Jewish name in existence at the time of Jesus. According to archaeologists and historians, that's the name they find more often than any other name, Simon. Very Jewish name, which is fitting because Simon was as Jewish as they come. I mean, he was really never in his life violated the kosher food laws, never would dream of eating with a Gentile. Very, very strict Jew. In fact, one time, even after the resurrection, God speaks to him in the book of Acts and tells him to go eat some Gentile food. Peter just flat out says no. No way. After meeting Jesus, This thoroughly Jewish man ends up with a Gentile word for his name. Jesus is establishing, remember, Jesus is establishing the new restored nation of Israel, and the lead guy in that foundation is a Jew who gets a Gentile name. What does that say about this new Israel that God is forming? Is this an indication that Gentiles are going to play a much bigger role in the new people of God and the restored Israel than anyone ever imagined? Well, we'll see as the story unfolds. All right, so what happened with this prideful, arguing, foolish, cowardly failure factory named Peter? Is everything in the Bible that we know about him negative and bad? No, no. Not at all. He walked on water. Now, granted, he wasn't very good at it, but still, he's the only other person besides Jesus that ever walked on water. Simon did become a rock. He was powerful. He's a strong man. When the people who had just murdered Jesus came and commanded that he stop preaching, and then they scourged him just to make a point, what did he do? He goes and prays for courage and goes right back out and starts preaching. He's a rock. Nobody could stop him. He was, he was, they tried throwing him in prison, God busted him out, he goes right back out to preaching. He couldn't be stopped, not by the chief priest, not by the Roman Empire, not by Satan himself. Church tradition says that Peter died by crucifixion after having, they made him watch his wife be crucified, and he kept telling her, remember the Lord, remember the Lord, and then it was his turn, he's asked to be crucified upside down because he wasn't worthy to die like his Lord. He was a rock. He became a rock. He's one of Jesus' inner three. He was given the keys of the kingdom by Jesus. He was given divine revelation. He's the leader not only of the 12 most important men in human history, but of the entire church in the New Testament. The whole first half of the book of Acts, he's the leader of the church. And he wrote two books of the Bible. A third, if you count Mark, he provided the information for the book of Mark. and his name is inscribed on one of the foundation stones of the New Jerusalem, and he'll sit on a throne reigning over the 12 tribes of Israel for all eternity." So, what happened? How did such an unqualified man become one of the greatest ever? And the answer is, it's not the story of Peter. It's the story of Jesus. When Jesus changed Simon's name to Rock on the day that he first met him, that was a prophecy of what he planned to do with this man. Jesus transformed him. He transformed him from Simon the coward to Rocky the strong. Why did Jesus call such an unqualified man to begin with? Answer, because Jesus doesn't call the qualified. He qualifies the called, right? The great statement that Stephanie posted last week, I'm like, wow, that is exactly what's going on here. Jesus does not call the unqualified, he qualifies the called. Any fool can spot disqualifying flaws in people, and most fools do. But what good is that? What good do you do when you go around doing that? Jesus didn't go around pointing out flaws. He went around fixing them, right? But, He didn't do it by just snapping his fingers and making an instant change, right? It happened over many, many years of painful, hard, excruciating lessons and failures. What did Peter have to learn in order to become qualified? What did he have to learn? Well, first and foremost, he needed courage, right? Because he's a coward. In fact, Jesus called all 12 of them cowards in chapter 4, verse 40. We'll see that soon. And He had to teach them how to overcome fear and threatening circumstances and trust in Him. Peter needed to learn restraint because he was impulsive and impetuous. So Jesus taught him about restraint at his arrest. He needed to learn humility because he thought he was above failure, above serious failure, I'll never deny you. And so Jesus had to let Peter fall hard. Then you see Peter after that, after Jesus looked at him, and you hear Cockcrow and everything, and he's out there weeping bitterly, and you see these are not easy lessons to learn. Peter needed to learn faith, he needed to learn forgiveness, tact, trust, and if you watch, each one of these times where Jesus in the Gospels pulls Peter aside and teaches him something, he's dealing with these things, these very lessons. And then, if you read 1 and 2 Peter, you'll find them all there. All this stuff Jesus taught him, he just teaches it. That's just what he spent his life doing, teaching that to us. Another thing that you see emphasized in the book of Mark is how all 12 of the apostles were slow to understand. They're just so slow. We see Jesus get actually emotionally upset more than once because they weren't getting it. And it wasn't an issue of intelligence. It wasn't an issue of education. It was an issue of the heart. They were slow to understand because their hearts were hard. That's what it says. There's certain truths that were easy to understand, they're not complicated, but they were hard to accept. And so they couldn't accept them because they couldn't reconcile them with other stuff that they knew. They said, wait, I know this, this doesn't fit, I don't get it. And that's a good lesson, because one of the biggest things that prevents people from understanding scripture the way we should is when we read something that doesn't seem to fit with something else we know, and so we try to force it to fit. Or we just ignore it, which is kind of what they did. They didn't understand about the loaves and fishes in chapter 6 because it says their hearts were hardened, verse 52. They didn't understand what Jesus said about the kosher rules because they were dull in chapter 7. They didn't understand Jesus' warnings about the yeast that the Pharisees inherited because their hearts were hardened in chapter 8. Jesus tells them in very, very plain language, I'm going to suffer and die and rise from the dead. And He says that again and again, and they don't get it. They don't get it. And Jesus has to rebuke them repeatedly for their hard-heartedness, but he had to rebuke them, but he doesn't give up on them. He just keeps teaching. He just keeps teaching them. In fact, he made teaching them a priority even above meeting the needs of people, and we'll see that in chapter seven, we'll see it again in chapter nine, where he turns his back on needs of the masses in order to minister to his disciples. He really wanted to work with them. And that's one of the biggest themes in Mark. Part of the glory of Christ. Now, the whole reason we're doing this study is to see the glory of Christ, right? To see Jesus. Part of the glory of Christ is the fact that he is our teacher. You want an attribute of God? There's one right there. He's our tutor. The word disciple means learner, right? That's what it means. So the most fundamental way that we approach the Lord Jesus Christ is as our tutor, our teacher. We learned that when we studied about Sabbath rest. Remember, he said, what do you say? Come to me and learn from me. Learn from me, and then you'll have rest for your souls. You'll find rest for your souls. That's such a beautiful image, right? Such a beautiful verse. Come to me, all you're weary and heavy laden, and learn from me. Take up my yoke, learn from me, and I'll give you rest. You'll find rest for your souls. Beautiful, beautiful thing. But the fine print in that verse is the fact that coming to him and learning from him can be excruciating because it's more than just classroom teaching, right? It's learning the hard way, a lot of stuff. The disciples, and Mark, he doesn't give a lot of detail about the individuals. It's mostly just as a group. And we find that the disciples, they were prideful men who wanted power and fame and glory. And Jesus had to teach them about humility and true greatness in chapters 9 and 10. And learning humility when you're proud is never a fun day at school. That is never fun. Jesus, you know, with Peter, we talked about he said, I'll never deny you. And and Jesus said, you'll do it tonight three times. And it was just a bitter, bitter lesson. And Peter wasn't the only one who had to learn that. They all did, especially James and John, who were the sons of thunder. In chapter 10, right before they enter Jerusalem, Jesus is just pouring out His heart. He's sharing with them in the most detail ever all these horrible things are going to happen to Him. He says, I'm going to be betrayed. I'm gonna be handed over to the Gentiles to be killed. Guys, they're gonna mock me, they're gonna spit on me, they're gonna flog me, and then they're gonna kill me. And James and John, immediately, right after that, very next line, they're like, yeah, whatever, but we have a favor to ask. We'd like to be glorified. We'd like to be exalted and have the exalted spots in the kingdom, like number one and number two. Could that be arranged? Jesus just told them, right after those words come out of his mouth, they're like asking about their own glory. And Jesus took the opportunity to teach them that seeking exaltation, by seeking that, they were actually asking for suffering, which they were going to get. They didn't even understand what they were doing. Mark doesn't get a lot of detail again about the individuals, mostly the group as a whole. And you see these lessons, even the situations where the Gospels, other Gospels tell us that it was one particular disciple that Jesus was dealing with. Mark will tell that same story and he'll say disciples plural, especially if it's Peter because he represents a group. In Chapter 6, Jesus taught them how to balance hard work and rest and how to trust in Him for provision. In Chapter 7, He taught them about ritualism. He had to teach them in Chapter 9 to pray and how to be watchful and alert against sin. In Chapter 14, He had to change their attitudes about divorce. In Chapter 10, the importance of children. In Chapter 10, the dangers of wealth. In Chapter 10, suffering, giving, faith, forgiveness. He had to teach them how to look for their reward in the church. He warned them about how to avoid being deceived in the last days in chapter 13. So what we see is Jesus is not only recreating Israel on new foundations, He's also recreating the very men who are going to be that foundation. He has to recreate them first. Because God doesn't call the qualified, He qualifies the called. So now He's called these 12 and He's working on them. And if you can't really relate very well to Peter because you just have a different personality type or whatever, just study the other 11. One thing I discovered when I did that sermon series on these guys is that Jesus, when He called these 12, He covers every base of any kind of personality type, which is interesting because you would think if you're going to pick 12 men to be the leaders of the worldwide church, you would pick 12 leader types, right? 12 Peters. He didn't do that. He did choose Peter, but he also chose Peter's brother, Andrew, who was the opposite of Peter. He was nothing like his brother. He was just quiet, background. He was the first one to come to Jesus, right? And the first thing he does, he goes and gets Peter, knowing that as soon as Peter enters the group, Peter's gonna run the group, sure enough. From that moment on, who's the leader? It's Peter. And where's Andrew? Number two? No. Is he part of the inner three? No. He gets bumped all the way down to four. It's Peter, James, and John are the inner three. Where's Andrew? He's just quiet behind the scenes. He's not like his brother. He's not the powerhouse. He's not out there blazing a trail. He's not making things happen. He's just quiet. But he's one of the guys Jesus called. And then there's James and John, who are also brothers, and Jesus nicknames them sons of thunder. They were fireballs. When they passed through Samaria and the Samaritan village didn't welcome them. Remember that in Luke 9.54, when the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven and destroy them? Great missionary heart, right? These people are in the way. Shouldn't we just burn them to a crisp, Jesus? I mean, isn't that the right? They were fireballs, and it's no surprise that just 14 years into the book of Acts and James is already dead. Herod cut off his head. John, though, was also a loud, thunderous man, but Jesus changed him, didn't he? Because John becomes the apostle of love. He's known for, I mean, he just writes constantly in his books about love, and he loved Jesus, and Jesus deeply, he's known as the apostle Jesus loved. He was closer to Jesus than anyone else. And when it came time to pass on duties, when Jesus died on the cross, he says to Peter, you feed my sheep. He says to John, take care of my mother. That's the kind of relationship they had. He seemed like he was soft. Fascinating thing about James and John is the different ways that the Lord used them. They both started out sons of thunder, but God used John by changing his characteristics, and he used James by channeling his characteristics. James was the first one to be martyred. John was the last of the 12 to die, and he's the only one that didn't get martyred. He just got exiled to an island and lived out to be an old man out on the island, banished, where he's of no use to anybody, right? Out there as an old man by himself. Oh, except he did jot down a little booklet you might have heard of, the Book of Revelation, bestseller. John ended up writing more of the New Testament than any of the other 12. Then there's Philip, the bean counter, who had all the calculations to prove that it was absolutely impossible to feed 5,000 people with the loaves and fishes. He's got that all calculated in John 6. Analytical, pragmatic, man of common sense and calculation, couldn't see past the natural. He's just, the night before, Jesus died, Philip is still confused about Jesus' deity. He's just, John 14, 8, Jesus says, don't you know me, Philip, after I've been among you such a long time? Philip, not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it came to spiritual understanding. Next is Bartholomew, who, that was his last name, first name was Nathaniel. Nathaniel had a really bad attitude about people from Nazareth. He had a prejudice problem in his heart. We already studied Matthew, how unqualified Matthew the tax collector was. Definitely the black sheep of the whole bunch, for sure. Then there's Thomas, the doubter. For some people, like Nathanael, faith comes readily, comes easy. First time Jesus does a miracle, Nathanael's like, oh, you're the Messiah. And then he never has another question after that. He's just like, that's all it took. Some of us are more like Thomas. We're skeptical, questioning, cynical, doubtful, doubting. That's the thing about Thomas, not only is he known, he's famous for his doubting, but he was also, even more than his doubting, he was pessimistic. He's just, he's like Eeyore. He's just like, in John 10, Jesus is gonna go to Bethany, and he's like, let's go that we might die with him. You know what I'm saying? I mean, you gotta like his courage, right? I mean, he's willing to go die, but he's just like, oh, we'll die, so let's go. And that's the thing about pessimists. They need a lot of courage to do anything, because they're sure everything's gonna be a disaster. The night before Jesus died, he gives these beautiful promises in John 14, verse one. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me. In my Father's house there are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you. I'm going to prepare a place for you. Is that encouraging to you or discouraging? It's like some of the most encouraging, all in favor of John 14. So that's like some great stuff, right? One of the most comforting statements ever imaginable. Not even the average pessimist could find something negative in that. But Thomas isn't the average pessimist. Verse five, here's his response. We don't know where you're going, so how can we know the way? Jesus promises heavenly dwellings and mansions and he's like, we'll never find it. So the next day they crucify Jesus, and Thomas is like, I knew it. I knew it. It's exactly what I thought was going to happen. Now here we are. We're alone. Jesus is gone. We don't know how to get to Him. And he's so dejected that when Jesus appears to the disciples in His resurrected body, they're all there except for Thomas. He's just gone somewhere. He's off alone. So they go find him. They say, hey, Thomas, we found the Lord. He's raised from the dead. And he says, unless I see the nail marks and I put my hand in his side, I'll not believe it. He needed proof. So what did Jesus do? He gave him proof. And what did Thomas do? He falls on his knees and worships. My Lord and my God. Next is James, son of Alphaeus. We don't know anything about him. He's an absolute nobody. Although he does emerge as the leader of his group, and he'll sit on one of the thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel for all of eternity. Other than that, though, he's a nobody. Jesus uses nobodies. Aren't you glad that God isn't dependent on celebrities? Next is Thaddeus, also known as Judas, not Iscariot, Judas, son of James. We don't know much about Thaddeus. He is mentioned in John 14, 22, where he asks a really insightful question about why Jesus was revealing himself to the Twelve and not to the world. He seems to have been a thinker. Simon the Zealot is next. In Scripture, the word zeal refers to... This is what zeal means. It's the quality of a person who gets angry at those who dishonor God. and does something about it. That's zeal in the Bible. You see somebody dishonoring God, you do something about it. You get mad, you do something about it. The great illustration of a zealot in the Old Testament is Phineas. He's the hero of the zealots. Phineas, he found a man and a woman committing sin together, and he put his spear through both of them, pinned them to the ground. Adulterer kabob. And he's the original zealot. I mean, he's like the model zealot. Now, in the New Testament, the word zeal took on more of a revolutionary flavor. And I always used to think that zealots spent all their time fighting against the Romans, but they really didn't. The zealots spent their time fighting against, they didn't attack Romans, they attacked Jews who sympathized with Rome. That's who they were mad at. If you were a Jew and you compromised with Rome in any way, the zealots would come after you. And they were ruthless. They would publicly torture and murder Jews who compromised with Rome. We don't know if Simon the Zealot was more of an Old Testament type or more of a political type, but one thing is for sure, he had to have taken some pretty extreme action against people in order to get this nickname, Simon the Zealot. So how do you think Simon the Zealot felt? when Jesus calls Matthew the tax collector to be part of the group, this guy collecting taxes for Herod under Rome, and he's a Jew extracting taxes for Rome out of the Jewish people. I mean, talk about compromising with Rome. If Simon would have ever gotten this close to Matthew in any other context, he would have put a knife in him. So what kind of people does God tend to use? He uses quiet people like Andrew, and he uses loud ones like James and John. He uses people by changing their characteristics, and others he uses by channeling their characteristics. He uses people when they're just wild, crazy, energetic teenagers, full of zeal and tireless, but lacking in life experience. And he uses people when they're old and tired and secluded on an island, forgotten by most people, but still important in the kingdom. He uses optimists who just believe immediately and quickly, like John and Nathaniel. And he uses cynical pessimists who doubt everything and assume the worst, like Thomas. He uses engineer types without a lot of people skills, like Philip. And he uses people who have totally ruined their lives, like Matthew. And nobodies, like James. And thinkers, like Thaddeus. This is the group that the Lord Jesus Christ used to turn the world upside down. Why are we told so many negative things about the apostles? Because it's not the story of the apostles. It's the story of Jesus and his awesome, creative, restorative, sanctifying, renewing, recreating power. It's the story of somebody who is so powerful that he doesn't have to call the qualified. He qualifies the called. And by the way, I'll just add this. If the church is the Christ's body, then we should be doing that same work, right? We should be qualifying the call. Instead of finding people's flaws and casting them aside as unqualified, we should be busy qualifying the call. Galatians 6.1, brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. The word restore, katerizo, it means to fix, to repair, to restore, to mend, to make fit for use. So you see someone in the church unqualified, roll up your sleeves, qualify him gently. That's the command of Galatians 6. But that's a whole nother sermon. We won't talk about that anymore. The focus tonight is on the sanctifying work of Christ. And this is how you deal with the failures and inadequacies in your life. You come to Christ who qualifies the called. And this is also how you handle the most painful, excruciating ordeals of life, the most painful things that happen to you. Realize this is Jesus recreating you to be what he designed for you to be. He's doing the same thing with you that he did with Peter. Peter's an example for all of us. I mean, Peter's interaction with Jesus is an example for all of us. Now, if Jesus is doing all this recreating and sanctifying and He's so good at it and all that, what's our role? Do we just sit back and let it happen? Or do we play some role in making it happen? Well, there's one more name on the list that we didn't talk about in there. Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Him. Jesus is always named last and always with a comment. The traitor. You can almost hear the writers spit when they say Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him. I mean, they just throw that in every time. He betrayed Jesus. Why did he betray Jesus? Well, he fell in love with money. The mention of betrayal here, by the way, is another clue near the beginning of Mark about the crucifixion, this third leg of the three-legged gospel in Mark, this fact that Jesus is going to suffer and die, yet another clue about that. The formation of this new nation is going to involve Jesus' death. His 12 foundation stones somehow involves His death and He's just given us that. He'll explain it further later on. But it also teaches us something about discipleship. Is Judas an example of Jesus failing in his efforts to transform the unqualified to qualify the unqualified? No. No, this was not a failure. Judas was not a failure on Jesus' part. The first 11 names show us Jesus' unlimited power to transform and use absolutely any personality type, overcome any amount of failure, any amount of sin. That's proven in the first 11 names. The last name in the list shows us that we play a role in accepting or rejecting this sanctifying work of Jesus. With Judas, we learn the crucial truth that Jesus Christ is either a sure foundation or a stumbling stone, depending on how your heart responds. And it's our responsibility to know Him as the former and not the latter. That's why we're so often warned to keep our hearts soft and receptive to whatever Christ is teaching you, no matter how painful the lesson. You know, I found out, I didn't know this, but I found out this week, it used to be that when a Christian got baptized, they were given a new name, a Christian name. So you're just given a whole new name, and from then on, the rest of your life, that's your new name. That kind of fell out of use, although there's a remnant of that tradition in the high church, you know, the church traditions where they baptize infants. As part of the ritual, they'll say, what is this child's Christian name? And they don't actually change the child's name. It was already the child's name. But asking it that way is just an artifact of that old tradition that used to give people a Christian name, a new name at baptism, which is a tradition that I don't think is such a bad idea. Seems to me like a good idea. Can you imagine All your life you've been George or whatever your name is, and then now you're Paul one day, or some new Christian name. That would just be every single time someone said your name, you'd be reminded of your baptism. You'd be reminded, oh, I'm being made into a new person. I'm a new creation. I'm not the person I used to be. Now, Jesus did that literally with Peter, and in a figurative way, he's doing that with all of us. If you're in Christ, you're a new creation, you're progressively being made into what He has in mind for you. You're moving into your new, true identity. You're moving towards that. Have you ever wondered why scripture always speaks of us in terms of holiness and righteousness? Christians are people who have forsaken sin, we follow Christ, we fear God, not men, all this stuff. And you read some of these descriptions of a Christian, sometimes you wonder, am I even saved? Because that's not really me. I can't identify with that. You read 1 John, and Christians don't sin, and they've, you know, and it's just like, man, that's just, it's hard to, and then the one chapter in the Bible we can really identify is in Romans 7, right? Like, all the stuff I don't want to do, I keep on doing, and the stuff that I want to do, I don't do, and that's the one chapter we're like, yes, that I can relate to. Why isn't there more of that kind of stuff in the New Testament? Why is there so much that describes us as holy and pure and righteous and God-fearing? The reason is because God, when God talks about us, He talks about us mainly in connection with what He's making us. That's the way He sees us. It's what He has in mind. It's our new name. It's our new identity. It's where we're going. That's what He sees when He looks at us. Because where you're headed is more significant even than where you are right now. We talk about President George Washington, right? We call him President Washington, even though for the great majority of his life he wasn't president. But we identify him that way because that's where he ended up, and that was his greatest point of significance. And that's the way God thinks about you. When He called you, He renamed you. In Revelation 2.17, that's when you find out what that name is. But from now until then, Jesus Christ is making you into that identity. And just like with Peter and the others, it's slow, painful, excruciating, but when we understand the purpose, we can consider it pure joy when we go through the painful trouble and hardship of life, even failures, because we know that we're in the hands of the Lord who qualifies the call. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for calling us and putting your grace upon us and then working in us to qualify us, to make us fit, to do away with the things, the dross and the impurities and the things that are preventing us from realizing our true identity. Lord, teach us to rejoice in this process, painful as it is. Let us see it in these disciples and trust that you're still the same God today that you were then. We pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Well, any questions? Comments? OK, yeah. Yeah, so why the different counts of the callings? Here, it's on a mountaintop. Other times, it's up by the lake. I think that even in Mark, we saw him already call some of these disciples at the lake. So he already called six of them. So this is a different kind of, this is not the calling, but the appointing. as apostles. So John is the one that gives us the most information, I think, about how they one by one started following Christ. And there's all these stages. So at first they're just kind of seeing him. And then he calls me and says, follow me, follow me. And they start to follow him for like a short term deal while he's down in Judea. which Mark just kind of skips over. He doesn't even tell us about the whole Judea thing. But they're baptizing with Jesus for several months down there by John the Baptist near Salem and everything. And then John the Baptist gets arrested and things heat up politically down there. And so Jesus comes back up north to Galilee, and that's where Mark picks up the story. And as soon as they get back to Galilee, the disciples, those ones that start following them, they just like, OK, we follow them for several months. That was a good short term mission. Now we'll go back to work and they go back fishing. And Jesus has to do this miracle where he won't let them catch any fish all night. And then when they do what he says and they catch fish and he says, I said, follow me. And they're like, oh, OK. And then they leave their nets again and follow him. And now this is the next stage where they realize, OK, this is like long term. And so they're still following him, and it's those guys and a lot of others. And then finally this time up on the mountain, which may be when he gave the Sermon on the Mount as well. That's kind of where it lands in Luke. But he designates 12 of the many disciples as apostles, and so that's like the next stage. So now you 12 are really set apart, you're special. And then he has another period where he's just working with those 12, and then he's going to send them out on their own several chapters from now, and then they come back and report. So that kind of gets it to the next stage. So yeah, there's just stages of development in them following.