Date: January 26, 2020

Bible Text: Psalm 27:1-9, Matthew 4:12-23 |

Last week we heard the story of how Jesus' first disciples got started with him as told by John's gospel. This week we hear about it from Matthew. The details are quite a bit different, but at the heart of it, there's an invitation to follow Jesus and to learn who he is and what he is doing that proves transformative for those who take it up. These fishermen embarked on a journey that they could never have imagined, that took them away from what they knew, and required them to reimagine all the skills they had and to learn entirely new ones. They needed to learn a deep trust in the one who called them. That is still true for those who want to follow Jesus, especially in these days of radical societal changes. The good news is that Jesus can still be trusted to lead us on this new adventure.


Notes from the Preacher

This is one of those sermons where I had it laid out ahead of time but wasn't fully settled or satisfied, and then while I was preaching directions changed and ideas came in that made it so much better than what I thought it was going to be. At least, that's my experience. The whole section about the psalms, for example, did not appear in my preparations at all. I hope you will find it to be meaningful in its presented form at any rate.

I'm including a picture of the "mind map" I used to organize my thoughts for the sermon. I'm sorry that it appears to be too small to read here. You can see, however, that it is nonlinear, which allowed for some of the changes in direction that I mentioned above.

On the off chance that you are interested, the map that I used at the beginning was of Washington, DC, which I think someone gave us when we moved to the area 16 years ago.

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