Knowing the will of God begins with being close to Jesus. Before any calling to preach, serve, or lead, there is a deeper invitation to be with Him. When believers place fellowship with Christ above all else, He Himself orders their steps, imparts power for service, and directs their calling. True authority and fruitfulness arise not just from our volunteering or striving, but from our abiding with the One who called and appointed us.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] Sometimes people do ask a question of preachers, do you have a signature passage? And the answer is often yes. And it’s also true in my case. And I have a signature passage and a signature sermon that began it all, being someone involved in telling the gospel. And it is this passage. And it came about because of two particular personages in my younger years whom I observed, who likewise seemed to always have the Lord with them and lots of things were happening. And I was very curious to know wherein lay their power. And so I inquired of both of them in different times to find out what was it that made them successful in ministry. And I was curious to know. And one of them was, as some of you who’ve been in the church a long time might have heard me say before,

[00:01:10] you might have even heard me speak on this passage before, but it’s worth everybody hearing sooner or later. And it was the person who’d come from New Zealand. And he was a very, very down-to-earth sort of person, his own personality. He didn’t do things by formula that someone else had given him. But he had the power of God with him. And all my ears, all three of them pricked up to listen, to find out what exactly it was. And I would often go down to his room in the college where he was a student and quiz him with questions to try and find out how is it that he had God with him when I did that often without going along with other students. And I would say they were good tryers. Lots are criticising them for being good tryers. But why should there be one person

[00:02:09] that seemed to have God turn up when he went to preach? And I wanted to know what it was. And so sitting in his room, he expanded to me and gave a little sermonette. And I’m now giving it to you in a form that’s come through me tonight. And it’s about Jesus. And it’s about Jesus and his power. When it gets delegated, it’s also about concepts like the will of God and concepts about how churches should be run in terms of what we Baptists are famous for. We run our churches on volunteers rather than officially ordained people being set up by their denominations to do it. We, as Baptists, have sort of got a democratic way of doing things that as people volunteer, so they do things in the church. Not a bad idea, except that what I’m talking about tonight is not that idea. There’s something deeper

[00:03:06] that also happens to be an application as to how God works within the church. And the illustration before us that this fellow gave me that day sitting in his study, his room, his bedroom, where he was a student in the college in South Australia at the Baptist Theological College. It reads about Jesus. He goes up to a mountain and called to him those whom he desired. These ones came to him. And so the very first thing that’s involved in this is the fact of the sovereignty of God and the will of Christ. And even though we base our churches as Baptists on their being run by volunteers, the truth is we’re not. We want people to certainly volunteer whom Jesus calls. But the one who runs the church is the Holy Spirit within the church. There is no other way that Baptist churches ought to run but by their people

[00:04:04] becoming sensitive to the lead of the Holy Spirit, which is the chief reason why we have members meeting as the ultimate authority. Because as the members report on how God is leading them, we can discern, hopefully, that the Holy Spirit is speaking through them. That’s the reason why we have the attitude of all the members having an equal vote. Because we want to hear whether or not God is speaking to us and the way you know is when there is that sense of unanimity coming from the members. And he appointed 12 whom he also named, verse 14, named apostles. So the first thing you notice here that in the scriptures when it speaks about church government, there is a hierarchy that Jesus appointed. And it is apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers. It’s a hierarchy that Jesus gave having ascended to heaven

[00:04:56] and having been given authority, he arranged his church. And so we’re not meant to be a church which is just a democratic process whereby people have an equal opportunity to be involved. Is that a hand up? No, no. Oh, good. Okay. So he appointed 12. So the very first thing you notice in the passage is the sense of the sovereignty of God through Jesus that he appointed 12 whom he also named as apostles. You’re aware of the fact the word apostle means sent out ones. So they’re going to have the role of being the foundation of the church but also to be sent out to take that church everywhere and to obey the great commission and go and preach the gospel in every nation or teach every nation depending on which translation you read of the great commission. So that they might be with him. Now here’s the secondary reason

[00:05:51] that Jesus chose the 12. He didn’t just choose them to be his delegates because he’s the one that picks the action people but it is that he had a purpose that they might, and here it is, to be with him. And this New Zealand fellow, his name’s Kevin, and he was an older, I was 14 or something like that age, and he was maybe 21. And he’d come from New Zealand, having just been converted, because he was a complete non-Christian, unaware of Christianity, took a short cart across some property, he didn’t know who owned it, but a man who was digging a trench called out to him as he passed by, and land happened to belong to the New Zealand Bible Institute, and this was the principal, but he was an old man, didn’t look like a principal, but he called out to the young man walking by,

[00:06:38] and engaged him in conversation, and led him to Christ. And there, the two of them looked at each other, and the young man really didn’t have anywhere to go, or anything to do, or any plan in mind for his life, but the principal looked at him and said, well, you’ve just come to Christ, I’ve got a college full of other people who are also Christians, and they’re a bit longer in the tooth as Christians, and you, why don’t you come along and be a fellow student? So he did, and he attended the New Zealand Bible Institute and had his principal giving him follow-up work as he was there. Eventually he came across to our college to continue his desire to find where God might use him. But in terms of joining the college, he discovered in the Bible College of New Zealand

[00:07:25] that all of the students were part of a type of culture that there is, well, there was back then more, I don’t know whether it still is the same today, to be honest, but a culture that used to exist in Christian circles, in Christian circles whereby people sought to be very biblical. And when you’re aware that you’re an evangelical, someone who believes the gospel, evangel means gospel, if you’re an evangelical, you sought to see the flow over from evangelicalism into a belief in the Bible. your connected doctrines, to believe the gospel was also to believe the written Word of God and to recognise the gospel was the Word of God and Jesus, the chief person of the gospel, is called the Word of God and so there’s a sense of authority that comes because the chief authority is the Word of God,

[00:08:11] whichever expression of those three you’re talking of and that’s what it is to be an evangelical. But in circles that used to be such back then, and I’m talking, 50-60 years back the sort of culture was not the same as today in churches but it was a culture that made a lot of the scriptures but as they made a lot of the scriptures it also was a culture that wanted to show themselves as following the scriptures and as I was trying to say this morning, there was a sense in which I think they overdid it. And when overdoing it they used to say well I’m doing this because I’ve got a scripture and if you could find a scripture that somehow vaguely backed up your aim in your life then you would say I’ve got a scripture therefore it’s the thing for me to do. Now sometimes God did speak to individuals

[00:09:08] and they were being obedient to the scripture and there were some very dramatic examples of that of people that God called to do different things and the calling came through reading a particular Bible verse but it’s a fairly rare event. Most often what one does as a person who believes in obeying the scriptures is that you find relevant passages that teach truths that are there true in black and white and you obey them. But you don’t necessarily have to have a verse that says to you exactly what to do. But it was amazing in the culture that was back then as you mixed amongst people particularly up at Bible conferences, up at Easter things, up at Mount Tambourine, that sort of place. And as you mixed into amongst Christians in Baptist churches that were keen

[00:09:57] to obey the scriptures, that very often people would give the reason for whatever was their decision about their new job or about their going somewhere else or their being friendly with a certain girlfriend or whatever, that they would say, I’ve got a scripture. Because they wanted to know if their idea they had in their head was to do something. They read the Bible hoping to find a Bible that basically would say something that would line up with what they wanted to do. Now you’re a man of my age. Do you remember any of what I’m talking about or were you not included in that? Not what you were involved in. Yeah, okay. Well I knew in Bible colleges and in those conferences because my family went to the mall and I was

[00:10:40] what I was brought up in that flavor of personages coming through our house. It was something that you got into the position where you very quickly were finding Bible references to back up what you wanted to do. And after a while I think you get to see through yourself doing that. I think there are times when God dramatically speaks through a particular Bible verse quite out of the blue. And you can be sitting in a church and somebody quotes the verse and God hits you with it. God does do that, but he doesn’t do it like three times a week. It’s not the normal average Christian life to have God having to tell you. But in that climate, one of the young people in my little group that I was in, we had quite a revival time amongst young people, but he wouldn’t ride his bicycle home all the way

[00:11:30] without stopping at some of the places where there were two different choices of which road to take, where he’d sit on his bicycle and say, God, now lead me as to which way I should go home. Sometimes he was sitting there and he never heard a thing, and that made it very frustrating for him. There’s a place for us to know the general will of God and be doing it without God having to be asked about every choice of street to take, if you take my illustration. But God does guide us, and I think there was something true about that culture that had us always waiting for the Lord to give us a scripture. It’s not a bad thing to have a scripture to answer when someone says, how come you’ve resigned from your job and you’ve decided to change career? And if you could say, well,

[00:12:16] the Lord spoke to me, then that’s pretty good reason so to do. Well, I was down in this fellow’s room because I was wanting to know how come he had the power that this passage talked about. It says authority to cast out demons because he was someone that I’d seen get busy casting out demons. And he was someone who used to win people to Christ. And he had found little techniques. He developed his own way of being a personal worker that had lots of results. One of them was, I’ve told the church previously, that he used to go into the Adelaide Bible station, the one in the city, and look and see when the next train was coming. Because back then the Adelaide station required you to get a station ticket. And when you knew when your next train

[00:13:05] was coming, 30 minutes from the moment you bought your platform ticket, you’d sit in there and you wouldn’t be bothered by other people. But of course what that did meant that my friend Kevin could see where the train wasn’t, that was meant to be coming next, was 30 minutes away and all the people sitting there with platform tickets were 30 minutes to wait and able to be witness to and they couldn’t get out of it, you know, because they were caught sitting on the platform. So he used to go in there and get talking up with people and he’d take me along to watch and learn how he did it. Now I led my first person to Christ in the Adelaide station because he started a conversation with a young man about my age and then as he was getting into the conversation and I was standing there, he suddenly says,

[00:13:50] now this is Jimmy, he’s taking over and he walked off. And I was put on the spot, but that fellow came to Christ and came back to Kevin’s church, got baptised and became a member. So God was working through him. Now if you meet someone that God is actually able to do the things the Bible says, would you be listening? I know I sure was. And I sure was able to see that God’s authority was flowing through him. I want to know why. So I asked him, sitting there, I’m sitting on the end of his bed and he’s answering questions about what happened in New Zealand when the principal of the Bible College won into Christ. Anyway, when he did join up in that Bible College and went there at the invitation of the principal, all the other students were the types who had been from churches

[00:14:42] and knew a purpose that they were there at Bible College and also had been a Christian for long enough to have worked out what God’s purpose might be for them. and they talked in terms of the will of God I don’t know whether you’ve come across the fact that in Christian circles you often talk about the will of God and a lot of people are saying what they know to be the will of God for them and I don’t know, maybe I’m a bit cynical but I only half believe it when people tell you this and that especially when you’ve been watching Bible College students come in and they’re going to be missionaries but they don’t end up going half of them do something else intervene maybe they weren’t called don’t know but when I listen to Christians who tell me what God’s will is I learn to be a little bit

[00:15:26] sceptical because often I think it was their will and they were just hoping it might be God’s will and I think this is a characteristic of us all that it’s not as an easy thing to know what the will of God is and Kevin in the college all these other students were talking about knowing God’s will and of course they asked him what’s the will of God for you he hadn’t even heard that there was the will of God for any individual. So he didn’t have anything to say and it troubled him. He went back to his room, he had the room because he’s now a student, and he pled with God, pled with Christ, to tell him what was his will for him. And he said to me, he said, I demand, I’ve got a right to know. What? They all know your will and I don’t. How come?

[00:16:10] Can’t you tell me your will? And the Lord pointed him to this passage. I’ve been preaching this passage ever since, since he pointed it out to me. Alright, well, we’re in the middle of this important point that Kevin answered me from the passage, that he said that he didn’t know the will of God only, and so God directed him to this passage and reading it, he meant more carefully, he went up to a mountain, called to him those whom he wanted, they came to him, and he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, so that they might be with him. Now this is a passage often quoted as the twelve first apostles and how they were called by Jesus, and I’ve read this passage, I’ve had it preached at me many times, and for the life of me, gloss over that little clause, if it’s a clause, as I have a verb,

[00:17:06] that they might be with him, the verb to be being a proper verb makes that a clause and not a phrase, so that they might be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach and have authority, cast out demons and all the rest. And Kevin said, as though Jesus talked to him on the spot, and said to him, my will for you, because he was demanding to know the will of God for him, is to be with me, and you work on that and I’ll look after the rest. And he took that literally, and he felt quite at ease to leave the New Zealand Institute College, because the principal recommended my dad to come and study under, and shift across to South Australia and set up there, and didn’t bother about whether he was doing it in the

[00:17:59] will of God, because while he worked at being close to Christ, spending time with him and prayer and whatever, and not getting at distance, then he could just trust the Lord would, you know, manoeuvre to get him in the right place. And so he told me this little secret. If you work at belonging to Jesus, to take it that his purpose with you is that he loves you and wants you close to him. He wants you to become someone special to him, because you work at being close. And he’ll look after the rest. Now, he was young as a Christian. He hadn’t yet done much theological training. He wasn’t giving me any big long… There’s a lot of extra things that could be said on that topic. But that’s a mighty one that I’d never heard before, and it’s become right at the seat of what makes me what I am.

[00:18:59] And I decided I’m just going to take it that God’s will for me is to belong to Jesus and work at it. And I actually had lots of probably bad habits or bad ways of thinking or ways that I was pretty hard to have as a student, as the school teachers would tell you, or even in college I was often known to have my own ideas and different from everybody else. But I left that in his hands. I’ll just be with him and work at it. And sure enough, God began to be working. And something of what Kevin did, I found, happened. There were differences, because he has different gifts than I have. And God turned up. Jesus turned up. And while I many times have the Lord put his foot on my shoulder and forces me back to this, this is my signature passage. That if I listen to it, God works out all the rest. It’s really true.

[00:20:14] It goes on to say that he might send them forth and to preach and to have power. He appointed us before, verse 14, named them apostles, that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach. And if you get the order of those two and keep it, then you don’t let… And the big problem is when you get involved in ministry things, you get bitten by the bug of liking ministry and wanting to be a success. But if you let that one take over and you drop the first, most important one to be with him, then you’re going to short-circuit the whole business for you. He goes on to say to have authority, to cast out demons. There’s a list of the twelve that are appointed and included Judas because there was to be a purpose of him being there. But Jesus chose his church leadership as the apostles.

[00:21:14] And if you work out where Ephesians intersects with this passage and with the book of Romans, you work out that church authority is not a case of us Baptists doing it by who volunteers gets to have a go. Why there is a place for volunteering is because if you follow through the storyline, you find that the disciples respond to Jesus and they listen to him and they go and let him teach them and they give themselves to be under that authority. So it’s not as though this is a passage that is militating against the sense of democracy because it is us having a volunteering role to play. that’s still there. It’s just that what is the major point of leadership is that Jesus appoints it. And we find it where he wants us to be. But we have to step up to that.

[00:22:15] There’s a place for our response. I’m not ruling out human response in being a part of the leadership of the church. But I’m saying that Jesus is the one who chooses. And in fact, in Ephesians, you’ll find that he has an order of things in terms of what type of gifts. How do you know where you fit in, of course, is the discovery of what gift you have. How do you know what that gift is? By happening. And you know the gift of the Spirit because something keeps on happening by the Spirit. It isn’t necessarily that you pick something that you want to do. That necessarily, if you were to be someone wanting to be obeying the Lord and you have something you want most to do. That often is the thing he wants you to do because it’s coming out of the naturalness of who you are. But every now and then at

[00:23:04] the college and having been there teaching in there for 20 years I’ll tell you that there are students who come who when they come in the door and they present themselves as students you say to yourself that’s a pretty good person to come to our college. And every now and then there would be a young man or a young woman who come and say, boy, they’re going to go a long way. But I’m telling you the truth, that when you watch where they do go, the ones that go a long way are not always the ones that we thought looked the part. Sometimes the ones that knew how to dress and the ones that knew how to speak, the ones that knew how to hold the floor, the ones that had natural leadership gifts, didn’t be the ones that God led and used. And there were a few in my year who I went to college

[00:23:50] who I thought, to myself, they really don’t have much nows, but they somehow got with them, and I hadn’t judged too early. And when you watch people across time and see where the Spirit uses them, that’s a far more important question. And it doesn’t necessarily correlate with the human dimension of whether people have personality, or whether people have organization, or whether people have ability to get on. They’re all necessarily helps. And a lot of the work that we used to do in the college as lecturers is to reply to questions that students come asking as to why they’re having troubles, and sometimes the answer was, do you realise how you approached it, or do you realise when you do as your personality gets you to do, you keep wrecking it all the time,

[00:24:42] or do you realise that if you just trust and wait, you’ll have a better opportunity if you don’t jump in too quick, which used to be my problem and try and answer every question rather than waiting for a better opportunity. There’s a whole lot of human discoveries that we help the students make but there’s a far deeper question. A deeper question is whether they have found where God wants them to be. And you start that by letting him know that the first thing he wants to do is that you’re going to be close to him. and if you work out being close he’ll get you where you need to be and you’ll notice if you read the passage take it home Mark 3.13-19 and read through there and you’ll see that there is a place for them to get with Jesus there is a place for them to get close to him

[00:25:34] and so when he goes teaching up in the mountain he called to him those whom he wanted and it says and look at verse 13 and they came to him There’s response, the human response is a part of it. But the fact of the right person being the one that gets to be used of God is not just that you volunteered yourself. It is that he wants you and showed you where he wants you. And when you yield in sovereignty to what he shows you, then it is the combination of him calling you and showing you and you yielding to it that something happens and his authority turns up. That’s my sermon for tonight and I’m going to have a prayer. Heavenly Father, I thank you for this wonderful passage. I thank you for that moment, sitting in that student’s room and getting a chance to ask him.

[00:26:31] And when I asked him, you know, how did he find the will of God? And he says, well, he didn’t know anything. And he just knew that you said you had to get close to him. He had to get close to you. And Father, I praise you for that fantastic learning that I got that day. I thank you for the other person who was the African guy who greatly influenced me because of his love for Christ. And I thank you, Father, for bringing along people like that who did something that was a contagion, that brought a deeper truth, Lord, that the greatest way to know the will of God is to get close to Jesus. And I pray that, Lord, that I’ll be able to pass that on to other people too, even tonight. I ask that in Jesus’ name. Amen.