Transcription of the Video: When the Rabbi says 'Come'

Jesus, the Messiah, came to the world of the Middle East to places called Judea, Samaria, Galilee, the Decapolis. He was born in Bethlehem, moved to Nazareth, grew up there, and taught for several years centered in the area called Galilee. 

We've come to this part of the world to see how Jesus made disciples. We're at a city called Scythopolis, about 15 miles from where he grew up in Nazareth. But this city is not what people often think of when they think of the world of Jesus. This is a city of arena, theater, university called gymnasium, temples, of wide streets and sewers and running water. An amazing place, and yet, Jesus didn't choose any of his disciples from here. So where did he go to find disciples? Come. Let me show you.

These simple ruins are the remains of a small village here in Galilee called Bethsaida. It meant fishing tent or fishing village, probably 600 or 800 people at most, maybe in eight to ten families. It's not far from the Sea of Galilee. It's not the kind of place I would think of to go to find disciples who are going to change the world. 

Look around you. Just a simple what's called an insula. An extended family lived here. Over here, I see what they think is the kitchen. Just a small room. Maybe 40, 50, 60 people lived in this community and that's where they prepared food. There's kind of a residence room, maybe a sleeping room or a room where people work. Here's an open courtyard just out under the sky. But notice no theaters, no stadium, no university - gymnasium, as we saw it yesterday. Just a very simple rural village in Galilee. He came here. To me, shocking, stunning. What in the world is he doing leaving there to come here?

He's in an area here called "the triangle" by some. It's a place where religious Jewish folks lived in the first century - people who were passionate about God, passionate about their way of life, passionate about obedience, passionate about the text. And they lived in small villages. Up there is Korazin, and up there is Capernaum. This one is called Bethsaida (fishing tent). Just a simple village.

Now, I'd like to have you picture something. Imagine in this courtyard, children playing. Mom and Dad sitting over there. Children playing. Imagine, now, five little boys, dark hair, dark eyes running around in some kind of a game. Do you see them? Let me give you some names. Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip. All five of those disciples came from this village. Think of who came out of this little town, a town of a few hundred people. Maybe six, eight, ten family units, all of whom knew each other. Think of who came out of this place. I'll say it again: Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Philip. Now can you imagine that Jesus came here to this simple place, simple stones, ordinary way of life and picked those five young men to be his disciples? 

So why does he come here? Well, I don't know the answer to that question. There probably are many answers, some of which I may never know or you either. But it's in Galilee - right here - where the whole idea of disciple was most prominent in the ancient world. This is where people came to be disciples of the great rabbis. God had arranged history so that out of all the places in the world, this is where that whole practice was happening. So Jesus came here to make disciples. 

So what's a disciple? What really was it? And does that help us to understand both why Jesus' message exploded out into the world, and does it have anything to say about what it means to be a disciple today?

So if you'll come with me, let's go find out what was discipleship. Come.

We've come about three miles west of Bethsaida. We're a little bit north of the Sea of Galilee, and we're in the ruins of a town called Korazin. It was a little bigger than Bethsaida was in biblical times but not terribly large - maybe somewhere in the area of 2,000 or so. You can see its construction, the color of the stones, the way it's layed out, it's really what you saw at Bethsaida. Not much different. About the same economic level. No fishing here, of course, because we're away from the sea. 

We've come here because we want to know what it would mean to be a disciple. What's a disciple? Well, I'd like to suggest there are several building blocks. One is represented here. They lived in community. In this insula was an extended family - grandpas, grandmas, moms, dads, cousins, uncles, aunts - an extended family. Maybe more than 100 people who lived here around this central courtyard, and their whole life was knit together. They had the same occupation, they had the same commitment to God, they went together to the feasts in Jerusalem. 

Their life with God was a community life. So they supported one another, encouraged one another, corrected one another. And one of the building blocks of discipleship is community. They were willing to live with a rabbi as a community of disciples. In the world we live in, we tend to think of ourselves as individuals. In their world, they were willing to be a community, because that's where they grew up. They understood that the community is more important than the individual. But not every person in a community became a disciple. So there's got to be more. Come. I'll show you.

We've come to the synagogue. It's really neat how it's so close to where people lived. So it's just a few hundred feet and you're in the synagogue. This was a significant part of the life of the people who lived in this town. Their whole world revolved in a way around what went on in the synagogue. It was a place of community gathering. It's a place where they came to worship God. It's a place where they joined on the Sabbath day. It's a place where the rabbis came to teach - either visiting rabbis from other towns or their own rabbis. 

Over here, a Moses seat. The person who was going to read the words of Moses in the Torah got to sit here to remind them that these were words that God had given them through Moses. And over here, what's called the holy arc, a Torah closet where the most precious possession of the town was found - the Torah. And the rest of the Hebrew bible called Tanakh. Nothing more sacred, nothing more special to them than that scroll. 

And they would come here on the Sabbath day and on other days and with pomp and circumstance, they would take out that scroll, carefully uncover it, hold it up to show you that the words are still on the paper. And the people's hearts would dance. Sometimes their feet would dance. People would reach up to touch the outside of the scroll, and then touch it to their lips to say, "May his words taste sweet. We love your word." 

That's the heart of what I would have seen here. Yeah, synagogue is communal. Synagogue is about worshiping and praising God, but this is what makes a synagogue a synagogue. Because you see, God has spoken his text, his very words that he's entrusted to us, to tell us who he is, who we are, and how to live. And there's no building block more important to discipleship than the building block of the Bible - the Scriptures to these people from Galilee. So the rabbis would come here. This is the only place where the scrolls were found. People couldn't afford to have their own generally. So you came here. Because that's where the word of God was. And you would sit - several rabbis with their disciples - and they would hear the Scripture read, and they could teach and discuss. This is where they gathered to debate. Because not everyone agreed how to interpret it, how to read these words. And this is where Jesus came. 

The Bible says he went to all the towns and villages in Galilee and taught in their synagogues. So picture Jesus, the light in his eyes as the scroll of Isaiah or of Leviticus or of Deuteronomy came out and he could raise it and then share with his audience those words. So a building block, a big one in the concept of discipleship is the importance of the Scriptures. But not everybody in synagogue and not everybody who knew Scripture became a disciple. There's more. So come with me and let's see.

This probably was the school connected to the synagogue of Korazin. Find a seat. Every synagogue has one. This is unusually large, believe it or not, for a school. So what did it take to be a disciple? What was it? How did you become one? Well, it really starts in the community and in the synagogue, but it really starts here. In this Jewish world of the first century, people went to school - boys and girls apparently.  Elementary school is called beth sepher (place of reading and writing). The curriculum of this school was the Torah - the first five books of the Bible. Kids learned to read, to write, to recite so that by the time they finished beth sepher, maybe around age 12 or 13, many of them knew large parts of the Torah by memory, could recite it, knew what was in the book, knew how to understand it and even explain it. It's an amazing thing how well-educated this world was in the text of the Bible.

At that point, many were finished. Girls would soon marry, take their place in the community as mother and as wife and the things that women did in that culture. Most boys began to learn the family trade. They would move on to the trade - whatever it was. Every insula had its own trade. There were potters and there were leather workers and there were olive producers, and each one had a trade. And the son would come home and learn the trade with his father, with his grandfather, with uncles and cousins.

But there would be a few who would have the ability and the passion - probably more important than the ability - to move on to the next level. There was a secondary school in this world of the Galilee called beth midrash. The rabbi that the synagogue would employ would teach beth midrash apparently. And folks who weren't busy at the time (the olives are harvested or the wheat is planted) could come and sit in beth midrash and hear the rabbis discuss the text - explaining it, debating it with those of other points of view. But there were a few who went to beth midrash because they had the ability and the passion to go farther. Young men, typically, somewhere ages 12, 13, 14, 15 would go on to beth midrash and to begin to study the deeper meanings of the Torah and move on into the Tanakh. They began to read the prophets and the writings, again memorizing large portions of that part of the word of God. 

And then, for the few, the very few who displayed unusual ability, it became a possibility to become what in Hebrew is called talmid. Say talmid. Plural, talmidim. Say talmidim. Now, that's the word in Hebrew that we translate as disciple in English. So when you read the life of Jesus, you realize he had 500, at one point. He's got a smaller group of 70 that he sends out. And then, he's got that really close-knit group we call The Twelve. It's really The Twelve who are what the Hebrew word, talmid, describes.

How did you become a talmid? Well, first of all, it's helpful to know the meaning of the word. When we take that English word, disciple, there's often a sense I find in the Christian world that a disciple is someone who wants to know something, wants to know what the teacher knows or, in our case, what Jesus taught. But a talmid is much, much deeper than that. Because the Hebrew word, talmid, means or refers to someone who wants to be what the rabbi is. Now, think about that for a moment. Yeah, you want to know what the rabbi knows. You want to know what he teaches. But it's much deeper than that. I want to be, in my walk with God, like the rabbi. I may have a different personality, I may have a different taste in this or that, but when it comes to my walk with God, I want to be just like the rabbi.

And that took both a deep commitment to learn the Scripture the way the rabbi knew it and many of them knew the Hebrew Bible by memory or largely by memory. But it also took a passion, a deep level of commitment to say, "No matter what the cost, I am willing to give up everything in order to be like the rabbi." A consuming passion. They lived with them 24 hours a day. They watch everything they do. Because how else will I know how to become like my rabbi?

Now before we talk a little bit about how you become a talmid, let me ask a question that I ask myself. Are you a talmid? Are you a disciple? Now think about how a Christian might answer that question. "Well, yeah. I believe in Jesus, so I'm a disciple." No, no. Stop a moment. If you cannot say, if I cannot say that we are consumed every minute of every day to be like the one we call the Rabbi, that we wake up with it, that we go to sleep with it, that it drives us, that it pushes us into this text, that we spend serious time with him so we can become like the Rabbi, if we cannot say that, we really cannot call ourselves disciples in the biblical sense. 

In that sense, I wonder sometimes if in Christianity we really don't have discipleship in the classic biblical model. How consumed are you to want to be like Jesus more than anything else in the whole world? Do you have the fire? Do you have the passion? So how badly do we want to be like Jesus?

Now as we leave here and go to another part of the world where these disciples went, remember that the heart and soul of who they were was that passion to be like Jesus.

So how did you become one? Well, you went to school - beth sepher, beth midrash - and you knew the text. And then when it was time to say, "Do you know what? I have that ability from God and I have the fire in my heart. I want to become like my rabbi," you would find a rabbi that you wanted to be like. You would listen to his teaching. You would see how he lived and how he walked in his daily walk with God. And then, you might go to him and say, "May I follow you?" 

Now he might observe you for a while. He might invite you to walk behind him for a while so he could get to know you. He might ask you some questions. And on that basis, if he saw the fire in your soul that he was looking for and if he recognized you had the knowledge of the text and the ability to understand the deeper things of Scripture, he might say, "Come. Follow me." In other words, "Come. Be like me."

But honestly, most likely most people were turned down. Because to be like the rabbi demanded an unbelievable level of discipline. Imagine memorizing the whole Old Testament. It demanded a fire that few of us can even comprehend to doing the things that they would do. And so most eventually said, "Do you know what? God didn't give me those gifts. I'll sit in beth midrash and listen to the great rabbis. I'll Torah. But I'm going to go into the family business."

The few who made it got to be disciples, and they would walk with the rabbi every day, 24 hours a day if possible, for several years until at last the rabbi said, "You made it. Go make your own disciples." 

So we've asked the question of ourselves, "Are we disciples? Do we have the fire and passion?" Now let's notice something else about Jesus. 

You see, typically, the rabbi waited for the disciple to come and say, "May I follow you?"

Instead, Jesus went out, found people doing ordinary things like fishing and said, "Excuse me. Come. Follow me. Come. Follow me." Stop and think about that for a moment. What does it tell you that Peter and Andrew and James and John were fishing? They didn't get into any other rabbi school. True, two of them had been with John the Baptist, but even then, they're back fishing. 

They didn't have, apparently, the training, the skill, they didn't have something that the rabbis looked for. So they were satisfied and said, "Okay. We'll be godly fishermen. But we aren't good enough."

But Jesus went and he said, "I think you could be like me." He picked ordinary people that hadn't made the all-star team, hadn't been the valedictorians of the synagogues. Not only that, but he chose them. Do you ever have it in your life that nobody believed in you? Or have it in your life that all of a sudden someone did believe in you and it turned your whole life around? Jesus went out and he said to those guys, "Listen. I think you could be like me. I believe in you. I know you. I know what you're like. I know what I am. And I know you could be like me, so you come and follow me." Enormous!

See, you can walk out of the synagogue school today and say, "I won't be a disciple." But you cannot walk out and say, "I can't." 

Because Jesus has said, "I believe in you." And that's huge. These guys knew deep inside that they could be, by the grace of God, the direction of the Scripture, the filling of the Holy Spirit," I understand all those things. But they understood that they could indeed become like Jesus as he enabled them to be. That was enormous in this culture, where most didn't make it.

Jesus said to them, "Remember, you did not choose me. I chose you." Think of what it means that Jesus believed that his followers could, by the grace of God, with a fire in their chest become like him. That, I think, is a consuming passion that we need to seek in our Christian world today. 

Now that didn't happen all of a sudden. If you read your New Testament, you'll discover that, often, these guys weren't very much like Jesus. It took time. But what they did is to spend every day, all day with Jesus. They walked with him to Jerusalem. They walked with him in these canyons, they sat with him in the synagogue, they even went looking for him when he found a few minutes to go off alone and pray. They wanted to be with him all the time. 

So let's ask ourselves a third question. We've asked, "Do we have the fire that we want to be like Jesus more than anything else in the whole world?" We've asked ourselves, "Do we really understand what it means that he believes in us?" Now let's ask ourselves the question, "How much time do we spend with him?"

Without being immersed in the text, which is the only way I know of to know the Rabbi, how will we ever know him well enough to be with him and to be like him? It's not only about the fire in your chest to want to be like him. It's not only the conviction that he believes in me. It's the passion to say, "I will spend the time I need to spend to be with him."

Say these words after me. A student is not above his teacher. It is enough for a student to be like his teacher. 

How badly do we want to be like Jesus? And so he took them out of these little villages, out of their synagogues, out of their synagogue schools, away from the fishing boats, and he said, "Come." And off he went into the countryside to other villages, even to Phoenicia and the Decapolis, eventually to Jerusalem to die. And wherever he went, they went with him. And they watched him. They heard him teach, "Obey God." They heard him interpret the Hebrew Bible. Who is my neighbor (Leviticus 19:18)? What does it mean that my yoke is easy? And slowly but surely, these young men from here became like the Rabbi. By the grace of God of course. And the world's never been the same. And now it's our turn. How badly do you want to be like Jesus?