Good afternoon.
Can we please turn to the Gospel of Matthew? We’ll read from chapter 9, and we’ll read verses 35 through 38. Matthew 9:35-38.
And Jesus was going about all the cities and the villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness.
And seeing the multitudes, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and downcast, like sheep without a shepherd.
Then He said to His disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.
Therefore, beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.”
And then chapter 25, the last verse of the last section of the five teaching sessions that Matthew gave before the crucifixion. Matthew 25, and we’ll read from verse 31.
But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne.
And all the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.
And He will put the sheep on His right and the goats on the left.
Then the King will say to those on His right, “Come, you who are blessed of My Father; inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”
“For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat;
I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink;
I was a stranger, and you invited Me in;
Naked, and you clothed Me;
I was sick, and you visited Me;
I was in prison, and you came to Me.”
Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, “Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink?
And when did we see You a stranger and invite You in, or naked and clothe You?
And when did we see You sick or imprisoned and come to You?”
And the King will answer and say to them, “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.”
And if we can turn back to Matthew 10, we’ll start in the first half of verse 5.
These twelve Jesus sent out after instructing them.
Matthew 10:7.
And as you go, preach, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Verse 9—I’m sorry, Matthew 10:8.
Heal the sick;
Raise the dead;
Cleanse the lepers;
Cast out demons.
Freely you received, freely give.
Matthew 10:16.
Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves;
Therefore be shrewd as serpents, and innocent as doves.
Matthew 10:24.
A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a slave above his master.
Matthew 10:26-27.
Therefore, do not fear them, for there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known.
What I tell you in the darkness, speak in the light;
What you hear whispered in your ear, proclaim upon the housetops.
Matthew 10:29-30.
Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.
But the very hairs of your head are numbered.
Matthew 10:38.
And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.
Matthew 10:42.
And whoever, in the name of a disciple, gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water to drink, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward.
Let’s bow for prayer.
Lord, we thank You for the songs that we were able to sing. Lord, the reminder of to Whom we are coming. So, Lord, we in this room, Lord, we are gathered around You. And we pray, Lord, that You might be able to speak to our hearts. We ask that You would open up Your Word, Lord, that You would soften our hearts. Lord, You would guard the speaking so that, altogether, it would be a glory to You and for Your kingdom purpose. We thank You, Lord, and we give You this time in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
When I was a teenager and I would come to conferences such as these, it was not infrequent that I would think to myself, “You know, I wish they would just tell me what to do.”
And I think that, after a period of time, we begin to realise that when we hear particularly a message that tells us what we ought to do, and we try to enact that in our life, soon thereafter we begin to realise that there’s not enough good in me to keep it up. Because learning what to do, in the end, will fail us.
And so, when the Lord Jesus came, He came among us. And before He gave us instructions on where to go or what He had for us to do, He gave us the chance to see Him, and to watch Him, and the good that He was doing.
Yesterday, we began to share about a water pot, a mat, a tax booth table, and a little portion of a street corner where a woman with a haemorrhage sat. These were four items or sites that eventually became obsolete or vacated because the Lord of the harvest came into their lives. They were symbols of the strain of our life.
And when the Lord came into the life of a Samaritan woman, He brought a spring of eternal life. And He gave water where she would never thirst again. And to a paralysed man, He caused the functioning of his thoughts and commands of his mind to be reconnected to the muscles and joints of his body. And a tax collector who wrote his own short autobiography became a disciple, which to him was probably the most amazing thing of all. And then this haemorrhaging woman was healed by the Spirit of God.
In these short illustrations or moments of the Lord’s life in Matthew 9, on the outside, they would have seemed just the regular day-to-day of the Son of God. But within these actions, we begin to see the principles of His body and the driving force of His love. We saw Him out in His field, among those whom He loved.
And there were sheep of every kind. He helped those who already believed in Him. He helped those who were yet to believe. There were those who were young. There were those who were old. There were those in need. There were those who were in need but didn’t know they were in need. It was every type of person who, though, shared something in common: that they had been cast down. And the Lord came to lift us up. And so He reached out, and He found us all where we were.
And so, brothers and sisters, we began to share that, to those to whom He has reached out, eventually He presents a question. And that is to look out unto the field and see on our own the sheep who are distressed and downcast, wandering without direction. And then He charges us: pray.
He’s charging us to pray because He says:
The workers are few.
This is a statement, a fact that He has made. And it’s likely unchanged through the years. And so He says, “Pray that there might be labourers who go into His field.” And so this is the question and the verse that the Lord has put before us for this time.
And I’d like to take a moment to share briefly from Matthew 25, which is the last portion of His teaching before He goes to the cross, as recorded by Matthew.
And in this particular section, the Lord is separating out the people, the nations. And He has one group to His right, the sheep, and another to His left. And to the sheep, He says that they had done all these amazing things: that when He was thirsty, they gave Him a drink, or when He was in prison, they came to visit.
And it would have been extremely reasonable for the sheep to have asked, “Lord, when did we do these things? Because, Lord, I don’t remember the time that You were in prison.” Right? It would be a very logical question for us.
The question really is asking, “Lord, You are the Son of God. When were You in need? You are all-sufficient. When were You in need?” Because the Lord is saying that there was a time when “I was in need, and you came to find Me.” And the Lord answered to let us know that “I have need for those whom I love.” That is the driving force of His need.
And so, what He has asked of the sheep, those of us who have been called out and saved—His question for us is to look out into the field where He has need, where our Lord is in need. It’s one thing to look out and see sheep, because at times we know our own hearts: there is judgement; there is further casting down.
But the Lord is saying, “You need to look differently. Look out into the field and see where I am in need, and come out and find Me.” He’s asking us to think differently, to see as He sees. And He told them:
When you did it to the least of these, My brethren, you did it to Me.
So, brothers and sisters, what He’s saying is, the sheep who have been reached out to, they become the labourers, the workers to go out into the harvest. And at the end, when we’re all gathered back together again, we’re still the sheep. He says, “But you were the ones who went out.” So, brothers and sisters, we sheep are always sheep. Sometimes we’re the ones who are lost and downcast, and other times we’re the ones going out. But that is the wonder of the house of God.
And so, we come now to a second thought. And that is, what are the instructions to those of us who would be labourers? How might we go out? And this is the part where I’d like to share that it may come across, as we read these verses, as a list of to-dos. But these to-dos have no power without laying our eyes on the Lord Jesus. To see Him is the very first and most critical step of reading into this next chapter, which is connected to chapter 9 through our theme verse.
Now, we remember that when Hagar was cast out of the home by Sarah, when she became pregnant with Ishmael, she ran to this place that was called Beer-lahai-roi. And the naming of the place means, essentially, that “I have seen the One Who sees me.” And the Lord came to her and told her, “Hagar, I see you.” And Hagar saw Him. And thus the name of the place: “I have seen the living One Who sees me.”
We remember, too, that Nathanael, when he was called out and the Lord came to meet him, He said, “You know, I saw you under the tree.” And it was the same thing for Nathanael: that “I’m looking at the One Who has seen me.”
And then, of course, we remember Peter. Peter, at the end of his life, when he was so sure that he would never deny the Lord—three times he did. And when he did the third time, the cock crowed, and he looked over at the Lord, and the Lord was looking at him. And Peter could say the same thing: “I have seen the One Who sees me.”
And then, of course, the Lord restored him with a very simple question:
Do you love Me more than these?
And in Peter’s faint and feeble response, the Lord then gave him a charge:
Tend, feed, shepherd My sheep.
And what we see here, brothers and sisters, is we come as we are. We come to the One and look upon the One Who has seen me. Yesterday, we shared that we needed to see as He sees in order to appreciate the importance of the moment. And now we would like to share that, in order to go out, we need to see the One Who sees me. Beer-lahai-roi.
And so there is no discussion of these next instructions in Matthew 10 without seeing Him, to keep Him squarely in our line of sight. The Lord Jesus, He taught us what it was to live in His field.
And so, in this context, He begins to share, and we would like to share about five sections:
Each of these five is a necessary strengthening in order to go out.
So let’s start with the first: “Freely you have received, freely give.” It’s in Matthew 10:8.
Now, it begins in Matthew 10:6, where He says:
Go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
Actually, to be honest, it begins in Matthew 10:1:
And having summoned His twelve disciples, He gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every kind of disease and every kind of sickness.
And then in Matthew 10:5-8:
These twelve Jesus sent out after instructing them, saying, “Do not go in the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter any city of the Samaritans;
But rather go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’
Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.
Freely you received, freely give.”
Now, what we see here in the beginning of this chapter is that He has a very particular audience for a very particular target. He has given gifts to this group of twelve disciples. The gifts are authority over unclean spirits to cast them out, to heal every kind of disease and every kind of sickness. He gave them these in order to go out to a group of people.
And that group of people, as we read here, are not the Gentiles, which would come later in the book of Acts, in the book of Luke. But this first going out, He was sending them out where He had already walked. And in this space, He says:
Go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
And preach:
The reign of the heavens is at hand.
“Heal the sick,” and so on. And at the very end, He says:
Freely you have received, freely give.
Now, we know that through this section the focused target audience are the Jews. But as we read through some of the instructions, we would like to share that the instructions apply throughout the Bible.
I remember, and I have mentioned how much I am so appreciative of the brothers who have shared so long at conferences such as this. I remember our dear brother Christian used to say something that I thought was so funny. He’d say, “You know, in the Bible, there’s a law of twice.” And I thought to myself, “What in the world is the law of twice?”
And what he was meaning was that there are times that something is said and confirmed at other times. And so the law of twice is referring to the fact that the five instructions that we are about to read—yes, in this particular context, they are referring to the Jews, but they are repeated by the Lord in many instances as His disciples have gone out. And so we would like to read these as applying to us, despite the fact that, at the beginning of this section, the first target is to the Jews.
And He says to them:
Freely you have received, and freely give.
Now, they had seen in the Lord how He would give. They had seen that there were times when He would speak to those who were in need, and He wouldn’t even tell them Who He was. They would come, and He would heal them, and later on someone would ask them, “Who healed you?” And the person would say, “You know, I don’t know. I didn’t catch His name.” There were other times when they knew Who He was, but He told them, “Don’t say anything.”
The Lord Jesus’ instruction, too, was the same. And that was the innate and pure objective to do good. He was not asking us to go out with a big advertisement for Jesus, or a blinking sign of some sort. It was a pure heart to show love to those whom He loved. And that purity translates so clearly when people are searching.
There will be times when there will be a curiosity, and people will ask, “What is their faith background?” I remember that when my daughter came home, I was a professor in the Bay Area. And when we brought our daughter home from China, it triggered all of these background conversations among the Chinese students: “What is his faith background?”
I realised at the moment that there are times when a pure heart to do good carries with it a loud, inaudible voice, that it gives people the chance to wonder. And so what we saw here was, in their going out, there was the intention to do good. And there was an authenticity of this intention.
And He prepared them. He gave them something. He gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal every kind of disease. Now, this was something given to them, something special given to them, but no more special than things that He might give to us in our area of focus.
To them, it was, “I’m going to give you these gifts of healings for the Jews.” To us, it may be, “I’m going to help you understand Algebra 2 for Wilson High School. And you’re gonna get good at derivatives and integrals.”
He gives a special gift for a special moment for a special population. Then, it was these things for this population, and obviously through the years He has sent different people into different areas with different gifts that would provide a connection.
These things are freely given. And they are not for us. The understanding of derivatives and integrals—and I don’t even know if that’s Algebra 2—but the understanding of these things, brothers and sisters, is not for us. He has given us things by which we can form a connection with those around us, or the moment and the space at that time.
And the connection opportunities that He has given to us are freely given to us. So I should say they’re freely received by us, and they ought to be freely given. They were intended to connect back to something greater and to introduce the chance that people might be able to search for something equally free, but far more valuable than math or even being healed of a disease.
So, brothers and sisters, He was telling us that “What I am giving to you is not for you. What I have given to you ought to be used for the kingdom, because you go under the headship of the King.”
And so, what we see is that in this moment, as our brother was reminding us this morning, Matthew 10 is prophetic. Because the connecting of this free gift that we are to be able to give freely to others—the connecting is back to something else, of course, that was free: that in the coming years, this Jesus Who was sending them out, He would be crucified on the cross. And He would be made, of course, an offering for our sins and a payment for our debt.
But it would have been that if you and I were watching at the cross, our conclusion would be that this gift of eternal life is truly in no way free. Because we would have seen the cost that was borne by the Lord Jesus, the price, the full price of what He had paid.
We had shared yesterday that Matthew was the great accountant. He knew exactly how many dollars each family owed in his little corner of the world. But Matthew is no comparison to the enemy. He is truly the great accountant. He has recorded each one of our sins. He knows the debt that each one of us owes to the micro-variable. He knows precisely where we fall short, and he keeps the running tab.
And so, of course, on that day when the Lord came and He was hung on the cross, He endured, and He, too, was tallying. He knew that all, all had to be paid. Every last one, so that salvation could be free for those of us who cry out. And so, when that was done, our Lord Jesus said:
It is finished.
Every last debt was recorded and fully paid for. And so, because of that, there’s something that we can offer. The connecting point of what He gave to us to give freely is also received freely and given freely. And that is the story of the price that was paid. Freely it was received, freely given. It is quite literally the greatest gift that has ever been given.
But, brothers and sisters, the Lord arranges all of the connections.
If I can give a short example. When I was in college, I would say I was a pretty good student. I would not say I was a great student. And there was one day when I was a sophomore—I lived off campus, and I lived in my own room—and I was trying to learn organic chemistry. And I might have shared the story with you before, but there’s a second half that I don’t think I’ve shared.
And I remember one day being so frustrated, because in organic chemistry you’re supposed to take one molecule and put in a bunch of—what are they called? Anyways, triggers that lead you from A to B to C to D to E. So you have to figure out how to get from A to E by putting in all these other chemicals. And I was just staring at my sheet, at this one question. I probably worked on it for about an hour, and I could not figure out how to do it. I was so frustrated.
And then I had this thought that came into my mind, and it was this: “Lord, if You were the Creator and You created this, then You know the answer to this impossible question. So could You please help me with this organic chemistry problem?” It was literally like that.
And so I finished praying. I looked at the sheet, and I went from A to B to C to D to E. And then I looked down at the paper, and I was completely shocked. I had no faith. But somehow it had gone from A to E, and the answer was correct.
And so, from that day forward, I decided I was going to pray before I did every single homework assignment, which I did. Purely selfish, right? I prayed before every assignment, and I learned organic chemistry so well that, by far, they were my two best grades in college. I had no doubt that He had explained it to me.
The next year, in our Christian fellowship—there was no premeditation about this—some of the sophomores, and now I was a junior, were going to take organic chemistry. So I said, “You know what? If you would like, I did pretty well in that class. I’ll try to help you on—I forgot what day it was—Wednesday, Wednesday evenings.”
And so they said, “Okay.” So we began to meet in their dorm, and we would start, and we would always pray, because I told them, “You’ve got to pray before you start, and you have to pray when we’re ending.” Purely selfish. And so we would do it. We’d pray before we started; we’d pray before we ended, and it was going well.
And then they began to invite friends, and more and more came. And then we got a bigger room. And it was so funny, because we had about fifty non-believers meeting together every week, praying before and after a meeting about organic chemistry. And it was just, you know, you would never have expected it.
And then my wife began to—she wasn’t my wife at the time—but she and some others would come and make snacks and cookies. And so it was in the dorms, and we were doing this. And for thirty weeks, we did this, an entire year, and it became kind of just normal. And they just became used to it: fifty people who would come, and we would pray before we began and pray at the end. None of it was planned.
Except all of it was coordinated by the Lord, by the Spirit. And I remember the last week we were together, I thought to myself, “You know, I’ve got all these non-Christians in this room with me. Probably should say something.”
And I went out there, and we had been praying, and I said, “You know, last week I was at a café, and I was sitting next to this couple, and they were just trashing Christians. They were just speaking so badly about Christians.”
And then I said, “I’m so glad that you have been with us these last thirty weeks. I appreciate that you let us pray before and after. And I hope one day, if someone comes to you and says, ‘You know, Christians all stink,’ whatever it is, that you might say, ‘Well, you know, I met some at one point, and, you know, they weren’t that bad.’” I mean, of all the things to say, this is what I said.
And then they said—I forgot who—someone said, “Thank you so much for letting us come.” And they were all nodding. “We really enjoyed being a part of this.”
And I think back over it, and what I realised was, the light wasn’t dulled, because none of us even knew what was happening. There was no perception that we played any role in this. It was simply because, by His design in some way, there was something that He had given to a couple of us. I had a friend named Brian who was helping me with it. And there was something that He had helped us with at one time that became a conduit to others for help.
And the light would have been dulled more if there had been some sense that we were somehow behind this. We were not. We all knew it. It was something else. And in the moment, the Lord always gave us the right words to say and the ways to connect.
So He tells us:
Freely you have received, freely give.
“Don’t hold on to the things that I’ve given to you as if they belong to you. Don’t hoard them. They are not for you.” And so He was telling us, “Go. Proclaim that you have a King.” And all of these things, they actually belong—they belong to Him. And we ought to use them the way that He intended.
So, our first instruction is, do not believe that what you are going out to give came from you. It did not. Let’s just settle it right now. It is something that the Lord has given to us, entrusted to us to pass through.
And He will be the Coordinator. He will work it out. He will, by the Spirit, as our brother reminded us this morning, by the Spirit, craft every opportunity. He will arrange every interaction. He will make all the connections with those people whom we are going to meet.
And they may be believers. They may be unbelievers. There are many who are in need, and we will be reciprocally helped as well. This is the functioning body of Christ in the house of God. So this is the first instruction:
Freely you have received, freely give.
The second is the next section, and I had to combine two of them a little bit, but the next one is from Matthew 10:24.
A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a slave above his master.
It is letting us know that the charge that is coming to us is of discipleship. Now, the section really begins in Matthew 10:16. And we are told at the beginning that He is sending us out as sheep among wolves. And this is a true warning to us.
I think it would be wonderful if someone would come and tell us that this particular obedience is going to be a walk in the park. It is not. We are told that we are sheep among wolves. And the truth is that we are engaged in the battle of the ages. It is the battle between our Lord and His adversary.
What we know of His adversary is that he cannot hurt the Lord, the Lord Himself proper. He cannot do it. And so, as a result, he targets, of course, those whom our Lord loved. And so we fall into the crosshairs.
And it’s a story that’s so common, right? It’s why Clark Kent can’t date Lois Lane, because the bad guys can’t hurt Superman, but they can hurt Lois Lane. Right? Or Spidey and Spidey’s girlfriend. Right? He can’t date her, as you remember, because he knows she’ll be a target.
Now, I say that comically a little bit, but you can see the logic of the strategy. Because he knows how much—he, of all people, knows how much the Lord loves us. He knows it. So he’s after hiding it, and he’s coming after us.
But it is in this context that the Lord reminds us that He, too, has been hated in this world. And He has called us to be disciples, to follow after Him. We are going to endure similarly to what He has endured.
And for generations, brothers and sisters, there have been those who have come and gone, who have gone into the world, the sheep among wolves, in order to reach out to those who are distressed and downcast. And it is because of their labour that there has been a torch from generation to generation.
These things don’t happen by chance. They happen by choice. There are those who knew that there was this battle ongoing, and that they had decided that they would run into the danger.
And the Lord said that to us:
The workers are few.
And this is true. But it’s easy to understand why that would be the case, right? It’s because, to choose this, there will obviously be difficulty. Well, how then can we be made ready?
Discipleship, Brother Kong reminded us, is an apprenticeship. And an apprenticeship is not only that we would learn a skill. Like if you were a luthier, right? You learned how to make violins. To be an apprentice is not simply to learn the skill set to make the violin. It was really that you were bound to a master luthier, and you lived with them, and you watched how they lived.
To become a disciple is that we are an apprentice to observe a life lived. We learn and watch, day to day, how that person interfaces in the world. So when the Lord is calling out to us, “Follow Me,” what He is asking us first to do is that we ought to be disciples, apprentices, that we would come and live near to Him so that we would watch Him.
Brother Kong, in his little book, said that when He called Peter, His calling was:
Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.
He was saying the first call is to be a disciple. And the second call is to be a servant. That is, that we need to first learn and observe His life, to be near to Him, to live our quiet moments together.
It was, again, Matthew 10, prophetic of the Word of God, which had not yet been fully written. The Word of God, which we can learn from today, is an instrument by which the Lord draws near to us. And with this instrument, He tells us:
What I whisper in your ear, proclaim on the rooftop.
What He was saying is, “There will be a time when, in your apprenticeship, in your being near to Me, there will be moments when we will be in fellowship, and there’s something that I will speak to you quietly, in private, in our secret place, the secret place of the Most High. And in those moments, what I mentioned to you in the course of your normal life will empower you and provide you with the words to say it, for My sake.”
It is to say that we need to have a nearness to Him that will empower us to be able to go out. There is no going out without that. And there’s no impersonating that. You can’t substitute something for that. We need to have a secret-place relationship with the Most High God.
And that comes in times when we have failed. We really learn Him, how much He loves us, in times when we have uncertainty, in our hidden failures or hidden weaknesses. These are the times when we draw into that place, and we realise that He is the only One there, and that He knows. “I have seen the One Who sees me,” and there’s nothing hidden from His eyes.
And it’s that nearness that changes us, so that when we respond to the call, the response to the call then generates something that comes from who we are, not how we were trained. It comes from something that we learn from falling that allows us to rise and to help someone else to rise.
And all of us learn this way, one from another, because this is the secret power of the house of God when we don’t inhibit or hide these things. It is that, one to another, we are bound together and lifting one another up, all because, in our secret places, the Lord is near to those of us who need Him.
So, brothers and sisters, we are called to be disciples, and then we are called to be servants. We are called to be near so that He can whisper something to us that will empower us to be able to go out, and it’s not the reverse. And this is the next secret that He tells them. It will be a hard road, but this is how we will make it through.
The third is, “Fear not.” And that is in Matthew 10:28. Is that 28? Yes, 28.
And do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul.
Matthew 10:29-30.
Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.
But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
Whenever we ponder fear, I remember this passage in the book of Acts, when Paul was before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, and chaos had broken out around him, and no one knew what was happening. And there was some worry that the mob would tear Paul limb from limb. And so Paul that night stood before the Sanhedrin, and as he tells the story later, as he gives his own testimony later, he says that “The Lord stood next to me.” And the Lord stood next to him, and He said:
Take courage.
Now, the Lord sees into our heart. Paul didn’t have to tell Him, “Lord, I am afraid.” The Lord could see it. And so the Lord told him, “Take courage.”
Courage is a wonderful word. The origin of the word comes from cœur, which is the French word for heart. So it’s basically to have strength in your heart. And so the Lord was telling Paul on that day, “Take heart.” And Paul knew that He was standing next to him.
Now, why do we need to take courage? Because, brothers and sisters, we’ve already mentioned that, in order to go out into the field, it really is to go out into a place that may be of danger. And when we follow Him, it comes at a cost to our earthly economy.
Billy Graham said so wonderfully, “Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you everything.” And so, the things that we may lose: we certainly may lose our reputation. It may cost us finances. It certainly will cost us our time. All of the commodities foundational towards a secure future in this world might be put at risk.
There’s also FOMO, which, for those of you who don’t know, like me shortly before, means “fear of missing out.” That if you did this, what would you lose out on? For the Lord to call us out of those things is certainly countercultural, because we live in a world where we are encouraged to hold tightly to all of these things.
Now, when we go through these temptations, we know that there are times when we will fall. There are times that we may give in to something, whether it be denying the Lord in a moment or hiding something of the Lord that’s important in our life. There are moments when we will fall, and loss will happen. And so, in these moments, we are brought back to that: “I have seen the One Who sees me.”
And the Lord tells us in this section that “I see you. I know. I know everything about who you are.”
And then He brings us into the marketplace. He says, “You know, if we were to walk down the street in Jerusalem at the time, and you pass by one of the carts, there would be a gentleman selling two sparrows for a penny.” And that’s a good bargain. But if you went further down, in Luke 12, you might find another guy in a cart.
The Luke 12 guy will know that the Matthew 10 guy was going for two sparrows for a penny. Well, the Luke 12 guy would say, “Well, I’ll give you five sparrows for two pennies.” Right? And the fifth sparrow would then be free. And I remember Brother Kong would always give this math example. He’d say, “You know, that fifth sparrow, worthless, is a throw-in.”
But even that fifth sparrow, when he falls, the Lord falls with him. That’s what it reads in Matthew 10:29:
And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.
That is to say, as we are plummeting, He is right with us. It’s like we think we’re all alone, like falling through the sky, like we’re skydiving. Suddenly you look to the right—the Lord is right there. You know, and it’s just an amazing thing to know that He knows and that He is with us.
And when the fear comes, and when we are afraid of failing, or we have failed, or we are afraid of what we may give up, that is the time most important to know that when I fall, He falls with me. He is not the One Who’s going to separate. We may think that if we’re falling, we’ve separated; He will not be the One to separate. He will always be with us at our side.
Then, in Matthew 10:30, the Lord mentions hair. Now, you can’t mention hair—for those of you who don’t know, I’m trained as a dermatologist. So the moment you mention hair, my mind goes into it, because, you know, we’re responsible for hair. It reads here:
But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
This is a phenomenal thing, brothers and sisters. It’s not that He knows the number of our hairs. The hairs are numbered.
Now, when we are born—and you’re going to have to forgive me, I’m gonna nerd out a little bit right now—but when we are born, all of the hair follicles in our head are already there. When we are born, all of our hairs are there. So those of us who hope we can grow more hair, I’m sorry to tell you, it’s not gonna happen. Okay?
Now, that said, as we grow older, some of the hairs miniaturise. They call it miniaturising, and so they fall out. So if you’re wondering what that is, I would show you, but, you know, you might have your own personal reflection on this. And so your hairs miniaturise.
The third thing that happens is when we are stressed out, our hair goes through something that’s called telogen effluvium. And what that means is that there’s a normal cycle of hair, like 80% of your hair is growing, and 20% of your hair is falling out. And when those stressful times come, there’s a shift, that only 40% of your hairs are growing, and 60% are falling out.
And so, when the Bible tells us—and I take this quite literally—that He has numbered the hairs on our head, that means to me that the Lord was there when we were born. And He knew, and He knows, how He made us. He knows, when we were born, the fixed number of hairs that we were going to have. He knew who we were. He knew what we were made to be.
And then, as we got older, and some of those hairs miniaturised because of time and because of the experiences we would go through, He, too, would know those things: that over the course of our life and the burdens that we have borne, we became somebody. And He knows, in our journey, where we are, perhaps because of the hairs on our head. By the way, this is probably more for men than women, but the hairs on our head that have miniaturised—we know this. He knows them.
And then He also knows when we are under periods of enormous stress, and something irregular has happened, and there’s been a shift to 40%. And He knows the burdens that we are carrying at the moment. So when the Bible tells us that He has numbered the hairs of our head, He knows who He made us to be. He knows us where we are on our journey. And He knows the burdens that we are bearing. This is Who He is and how much He knows us.
So, when fears come, we have to see the One Who sees me, to know that He is with us.
Fourth: “Take up your cross and follow Me.”
Maybe perhaps what we’ll do is we can read a couple of verses. Well, I don’t think I have time. So what I will do is, we will simply share that one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine times throughout the Gospels, the Lord has told us to “Follow Me.” And five times, He has told us that, in order to do so, we have to deny ourselves and take up our cross.
He told Peter:
Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.
I know My sheep.
They hear My voice, and they follow Me.
He said:
Whoever serves Me, they must follow Me;
That where I am, there My servant will also be.
He told the rich young ruler:
Sell what you possess, give to the poor, and follow Me.
And then in Luke 14, and in Matthew 10, in Mark 8, in Luke 9, in Matthew 16, the Lord tells us all these times:
Deny yourself, and take up your cross, and follow Me.
Why, brothers and sisters?
There is an inherent danger to discipleship. And that danger is, as one of our brothers called out yesterday morning, the flesh. The flesh has to be number one. In the throne of our heart, seated on that throne, he has to be there, and he will not give up without a fight. And he is the greatest threat to what the Lord wants to achieve in our life.
And there was a moment when Paul was leaving the Ephesians in the book of Acts, and he was telling them that hardship will come, encouraging them to go on. And he said, “There will be wolves that are going to come out even from among you.” Earlier, we had been warned that we’d be sheep surrounded by wolves. Now Paul was telling the Ephesian saints, “There will be wolves among you.”
And he gave them a protection. And the protection that he gave them was something he knew the Lord Jesus said, which was a corollary to the verses that we read. And the Lord told them:
It is more blessed to give than to receive.
Now, I thought that that was just an American saying during Christmas. But this is something that is in red letters in my Bible that Paul remembered from the Lord Jesus:
It is more blessed to give than to receive.
It is to suggest that I am going to take up the cross and not allow myself to be first. It is foundationally of the Lord and in the Bible. It is a protection against the selfish heart that would want to poison the Lord’s work.
And so, brothers and sisters, Dana said it yesterday morning. It is the mark, the only way that we are able to follow Him, follow Him, all the places that He would have us to go. And as we live our life with Him and we see Him, it leaves an imprint in our hearts.
I’ve shared about this passage before, and I remember this one year at a conference on the West Coast. That year, I was responsible for getting one of the dorms ready. And I remember going into the dorm. And this was the dorm that was going to be for the seventy- and eighty-year-olds.
So I got into the dorm the morning of the retreat, and I realised that all of the beds had not been lowered. They were, I don’t know, seven to eight feet tall. And I stared, and I just didn’t know what to do. And so several brothers kind of thought about it. We decided to go to Home Depot and get a whole bunch of power tools, and we were going to lower all of them.
So we came back, and by the time we came back, some of the saints had arrived. They didn’t tell us. And I walked into one room which was occupied by a lifelong servant of the Lord. And I didn’t know; I just saw the bed. So I climbed up to start taking it down. The first thing was to take the mattress down and throw it on the ground.
So I went up to take the mattress down, and I realised that he had made his bed. And he had made his bed, and there was a pillow, and next to the pillow was a Bible. And he wasn’t in the room, and I went out, and I found out that that brother was eighty-five years old. And I couldn’t believe it. I stared, not knowing what to say.
Because someone had denied himself and thought this was what the Lord prepared for him: “Where I was gonna sleep.” I was in shock.
Another one, a sister—we got in there; she was there also. I don’t know how old she was. But someone had helped her at least move the mattress onto the ground. And she was sitting on the ground, and I told the sister, “We’re going to lower your bed.”
And she said, “No, other people need it more than me.”
I said, “No, we’re gonna lower the bed.”
And she looked at me. She said, “No.”
And I said to her, “Sister, you can’t get up.”
And she said, “I can get up.”
I knew this sister. I said, “Show me.”
So the sister looks at me from the bed. She’s sitting on the bed. And then she did this thing where she turned around. She lay somehow; she did sort of a sideways somersault, somehow got up on her knees, lifted herself up, turned around, looked at me, and she said, “See?”
And I looked at her, and I won’t forget this. And I just looked at her, and first of all, it was really humorous. But it was a memory to me of saints who denied themselves because they thought that other people needed it more and that she could make do. And I lost. I didn’t end up lowering the bed.
There’s a life, brothers and sisters. When we follow that life, He teaches us to deny ourselves.
The last section is section five, and it’s just short, and it’s a reminder to us. And it reads here in Matthew 10. It’s the last verse, Matthew 10:42.
Whoever, in the name of a disciple, gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water to drink, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward.
This was what the Lord was telling us in Matthew 25: “Don’t forget about the children.” It was a special instruction at the end.
This morning during the Lord’s table, I had the chance to sit behind Josh’s kids, his daughters. And you look at them, and you realise that they are everything to us. Everything. They’re everything to the Lord.
Children—now, I have to be careful, because our young people who are in high school, I guess technically they’re still children, but they are, you know, they are the age to be those who march. But I think that there is a reminder to us that we need to be watchful for the children, because they are everything to Him.
And when they are thirsty or in need, we need to bring them water. You know, that’s probably physical, but there’s also obviously a spiritual side to it: that we need to be watchful for them, and that we need to let them know that they are loved.
And this is true, of course, in our families. And it’s also true in the house of God, that when they look back and think about where they grew up, and the saints around them, they knew, “You know, I have just this imprint of the love that they had for me.” And we need to be faithful to this instruction.
It’s hard, because in the world, sometimes the culture of the world is that, in certain cultures, the younger serve the older. But this is not the case in the house of God. In the house of God, the older need to stand in defence of the young. And we need to deny ourselves, and we need to protect them. And we need to show them love.
An old pastor, Harry Ironside—and many of you may have read his books—said, for those of us who teach from the Word, we need to put the cookies where the children can reach them. And it’s a good reminder that we can shine a lot of truth, and we can teach the Word, but as we teach the high things of the Lord, we need to remember the cookies, that people who are young can understand what the Lord is trying to say.
A number of years ago—I was sharing this with some of the brothers from Massachusetts—I was at Harvard Square, and I went to an old bookstore, and I found an old book about the history of Christianity. And so I was just reading it there, and there was a little blurb about Brother Nee.
And I’m sure that the rest of it, I’m sure it was inaccurate, but it said something that I’m quite sure many of the brothers who have come and gone would withdraw from. And what the author said was that they introduced an intellectual Christianity.
But, brothers and sisters, I think, with every fibre of our beings, and of those who have come before and know what has been said, the things that have been spoken and said, that that would be the last thing that we would want. Christianity is our life, and the Lord Jesus is our King.
And so, as we move forward into the field, we need to be able to teach the amazingly high and wonderful things in ways that we can grasp, and that we can marvel at, and have them impress our life.
So, brothers and sisters, these are the five instructions. There are more in this section, but we leave them here, and brothers and sisters can go back and read Matthew 10 to see what else is there. But we would like to finish: why follow Him? Why? Why follow Him into the field where the harvest is ready?
Well, we remember that there was a place that we could not follow Him. And that is what our Catholic brothers and sisters would call the Via Dolorosa, which is the way that the Lord walked to Calvary, where He died.
And along the road, of course, we all know that, one by one, both physically and spiritually, we dropped away. And even at the very end, of course, the Father dropped away. And so He walked this way on His own.
And we think of Him, our courageous Lord Jesus, and everything that He gave, because He was going out, brothers and sisters, to sow. He was going to sow the field, and it was at such great cost.
That when time comes, and He calls out to us to follow Him out to reap, brothers and sisters, He is so worthy, at such great cost. We have to think about what we would refuse to do. So may we have a heart to understand the weight of what this charge means to all of us.
Let’s bow for a word of prayer.
Lord, we worship You and thank You. And we thank You, Lord, that You have drawn near to us so that we can live close to You. And, Lord, we pray that in our life, Lord, You would draw us nearer and nearer to You, so that we would be more and more like Thee. We thank You, Lord, and we give You praise in Jesus’ name. Amen.