Kingdom Come | Week 4 | "From Seeing to Following"
Pastor Dave Brown preaches on "From Seeing to Following" this week.
MESSAGE NOTES
Kingdom Come
"From Seeing to Following" // March 23, 2025
Teacher: Dave Brown
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. — Matthew 11:28-30
Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me [following Me as My disciple]. — Matthew 11:29
For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian. One is not required to be, or to intend to be, a disciple in order to become a Christian, one may remain a Christian without any signs of progress toward or in discipleship…Churches are filled with “undisciplined disciples”…Of course there is in reality no such thing. Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ. —Dallas Willard, The Great Omission
Disciple says we are people who spend our lives apprenticed to our master, Jesus Christ. We are in a growing-learning relationship, always. A disciple is a learner, but not in the academic setting of a schoolroom, rather at the work site of a craftsman. We do not acquire information about God but skills in faith. — Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction
1 - Be with Jesus 2 - Become Like Jesus 3 - Do as Jesus Did
1 - Be with Jesus
3 Places to Experience God’s Presence 1 - Scripture 2 - Creation 3 - People
2 - Become Like Jesus
Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified. — John 17:17-18
In our kind of culture anything, even news about God, can be sold if it is packaged freshly; but when it loses its novelty, it goes on the garbage heap. There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness. — Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction
3 - Do as Jesus Did
The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. —Luke 4:18-19
Our tendency today is to define “the poor” economically, on a scale of annual household income or with reference to an established, national or international poverty line. But this is only another reflection of our tendency to read our own world back into Luke’s…Luke is concerned above all with a category of people ordinarily defined above all by their dishonorable status, their exclusion. — Joel Green, The Theology of the Book of Luke