Jesus Is Getting A Crew Together
In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles:
Simon, whom he named Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon who was called the Zealot, and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.
And he came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, ’
I wish they would have had Facebook in 0. Not so that I could see the funniest memes about Herod the Tetrarch, but so that we could see how Jesus builds His church.
Every time Peter caught some fish, he’d post a blurry picture of a little corner of what he caught. Then a few hours later, he’d post some lengthy scrawl complaining about all of the tax he had to pay on the fish he caught. Darned Romans.
Then Matthew would be posting pictures of his sweet new rug, robe, and of course a picture of his dinner. Every time those smelly fundamentalist fishermen caught a bunch of fish, he made bank!
Simon the zealot is that guy that hates the government, institutions, organization, order, and has every T-shirt to show it. He’s in a huge group of people that is organized to hate…people in groups…that are organized. He probably got banned from Facebook for 30 days for hating the government and using hate speech. But he’s back now, unfortunately.
And then there’s Judas. He’s clipping those coupons and sharing every deal you can find, even the sunglasses for bitcoin deals. And he is always the first to like whatever Jesus posts.
Jesus didn’t pick these guys after the kind of interview process we’d suspect. They had been with Him for a while, but His interview was hours long, and it was with the Lord.
Jesus withdrew to pray all night because the 12 that He would choose were quintessentially symptomatic of the fallen creation. Anger, greed, betrayal, apathy, doubt all existed in the 12 He chose (and that was just Peter!).
If those guys drew together like a family (11 did anyway) in just 3 years with Jesus, how much more so can we as Christians after lifetimes of following Christ? With Christ as the point of our lives, we can put aside so many other Controversies Of The Week and be brothers and sisters.
Jesus prayed all night before He called you too.
It was another night that was interrupted by Roman soldiers instead of daylight.
After that night, I bet all of the disciples’ Facebook posts went quiet for a few days. And then, they were completely different.
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