You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!

Hi, thank you for looking at this sermon. I hope it helps. Please do not say the sermon did not help you just because you did not like the style or could not use the entire message for your own needs. I have discovered a few souls automatically hit the ’did not help me’ button if the message they read was not what they were looking for. Please only hit that button if you think God’s people would not be blessed by the message below. Thank you.

Have you ever been put in a situation that required you to provide a skill that you did not really own? It’s sort of like that new job feeling, where you are sitting behind a desk wondering, “What now?” I had such an experience when I worked at GIANT food as a cashier and management trainee. I came in to work one day, prepared to get behind the cash register, when to my surprise I was told that I was assigned to the frozen food section. Now I was never trained for that position, I had no clue what to do, and I shared that with the management, but they stuck me in there anyway. So I spent the entire day trying to figure out what it was they wanted me to do. Eventually I called the person that normally worked in frozen foods section and he explained the work load, but boy did I feel silly.

Later on, I figured out that I was put in that position for a reason. Each management candidate was approached in a different way, for the purpose of creating solid management material. I guess they wanted to build my skills by calling me to a unique task. And that is sort of how Jesus gathered his disciples and how he also gathered you and me.

Think about this for a moment: none of us have precisely the same story of how we began our personal walk with Jesus. We may have all been baptized but what I am talking about here is when you came to understand that there is more involved with being a Christian than just knowing the stories. I am talking about that moment when you realized Jesus working in, with and all around your live and that he takes a personal interest in who you are and what you do.

The way the Lord got me was through music. He got a friend of mine through working through other friends. Another person I know came to faith by way of a prophecy that included him. There are just so many different ways that our Lord approaches us.

In our text, we have two different examples of Jesus calling a follower. For Phillip we have the standard calling of “FOLLOW ME”. Personally I pray to God that evangelism would be that easy. Don’t you. Wouldn’t it be great if all we had to do in creating disciples was to walk up to a stranger and say, “FOLLOW CHRIST?” But our Lord reminds us that we have a bit more to do and say in order to get the same results of new followers. Anyway, Philip was called by the standard approach, but in the case of Nathanael, we have quite a different story of conversion.

Listen to verse 44 and following….”Now Philip was from Bethsaida, of the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found Him of whom Moses in the Law and also the Prophets wrote-Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” But Nathanael did not respond as rapidly as the other men. He was not so quick to jump on the bandwagon. In fact he doubted the news from the moment he heard it when he said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth.” Nathanael in my opinion represents all those souls out there that do not so quickly respond to the message of Christ. Yet this is a good thing because Nathanael eventually does come around.

Quite often Jesus comes across souls like that of Nathanael; souls that are not so compelled by the hearing of good news; souls that need a good convincing before they ever take the first step of faith. But Jesus has a plan for them, for you and for me. Each of us is different and for that reason Jesus might have approached us all in very different way. He might have worked on you through your intellect, or talent, or past trials, or even present needs. And the reason Jesus does this is because he is setting us up for the particular sort of serving that we will best be suited for.

Let me explain that a bit further. Since God gathered me through music, music is the way I often like to gather others. It is my media of choice. It is my passion mostly because I am so connected to how well Christian music can reach the lost soul.