Eiphany 3

Epiphany 3 Repent. Follow me. I will make you fish for people. (Matthew 4:17 & 19)

Where John the Baptist had preached: repent and prepare, Jesus preached repent, follow, become.

John preached a call to prepare. Jesus preached a call to action.
The call to action is threefold. The first part of the call to action is the call to repent. The call to repentance is the call to stop, pay attention, measure, change.
Stop right where you are and pay attention to how you live. Pay attention to how you speak to other people. Pay attention to where you spend your time, your money and you life’s energy.

As you stop and pay attention then measure what you observe about your life by the perfect mirror of love. That perfect mirror is Jesus Christ. He is the ideal form, plan and pattern for human nature. Anything less than the original pattern is broken, distorted, lost. Anything less than the original pattern is sin.
That sin corrupts and destroys our life. Sin promises pleasure and power. It delivers frustration, fear and despair. The call to repentance is the call to the abundant life.

As you measure your life against the life of Christ you will fall short. Where you fall short is where God is inviting you to change. Repentance is incomplete if there is no transformation. This transformation cannot come as an act of the will. It can only come as we make a real choice to immerse ourselves in the steadfast, holy, eternal love of God made flesh in Jesus Christ.

The call to repentance is the call to healing, the call to wholeness, the call to holiness. It is a never ending process of choice and transformation. It has the threefold purpose of opening our souls to the unconditional love of God, our hearts to the sacrificial love of other people, and our spirit to the transforming love of our true nature.

The call to repentance is the call to follow Jesus Christ. We cannot follow Christ by our own will. We cannot follow Christ from the place of self will, fear and pride. We follow Christ in the many various choices we make every day of our lives.
Christ himself provides the power we need to make the changes we need to grow in love. That power is the personal presence of God the Holy Spirit.

The 12 apostles needed three years to understand repentance. They needed to hear God’s truth and to experience God’s truth. They needed to hear their own resistance to God, experience their own rebellion, and unlearn the values and priorities of their time and culture that kept them separate from God.

The apostles experienced faith as a journey. They started well. They left their old lives and followed Jesus. They moved slowly. They left their old lives but not their old way of living. Their three year journey with Jesus was a slow and sometimes tedious journey from fear into faith.

The fear comes from separation. We claim the right to define God as we chose then live with the fear that if we created God does God have his own existence. Jesus is the reality of God who he is to enter into a personal relationship with him.
If we make that choice, to enter into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ, we enter into a journey of faith. The faith comes as we surrender our demand to define God, the world, other people, even ourselves according to our own self will.
The faith develops as we walk the paths of our individual lives in communion with the co-eternal Son of God.
It took three years for the apo
stles to comprehend that the prayer of faith is: Heavenly Father, not my will but your will be done.
It took three years before the apostles were ready to accept the call to evangelize, to fish for people. They were never perfect. They never completely agreed with each other on even the basics. What made their mission possible was the transformation of their understanding of God. In that transformed understanding came a commitment to personal loyalty and personal transformation.

They learned who God is by spending time with Jesus Christ. They learned where sin corrupted human nature by observing the sinless life of Christ. They learned about their own selfishness and pride as they interacted with each other and as Jesus asked them to pay attention to their attitude and actions.

Jesus is the new life God offers us. The three years Jesus spent with the 12 apostles is representative of the new way of living God invites us to experience. Every Sunday we hear a reading from the gospel. That reading is God’s call to us to repent, follow and become.

A fundamental principle of the Kingdom of God is that we are not yet who we can become. Each moment of our lives is a moment of real choice to hear the invitation to faith. That is why each moment of our lives here and now is an eternal moment with eternal consequences.

Jesus does not expect us to be perfect in this life. He does expect us to transform. He does not expect us to transform by our own will. He supplies to us the indwelling personal presence of God the Holy Spirit to accomplish this.

Where do you need to repent? The answer starts by paying attention to where you live life from the place of demand, threat and reaction. That is your place of grace. That is your invitation to transformation.

Where is Jesus asking you to follow him? Many people have the mistaken idea that Jesus will lead us into places we don’t want to go. Jesus never leads any place that he has not prepared us to embrace and enjoy. The principle by which we can discern the will of God is the steadfast holy love of God.

The principle manifests in our lives in three ways: worship, service, personal transformation. Jesus asks us to follow him into a more joyful and profound self offering in worship, a more self sacrificing experience of service to others, and an amazing adventure of transforming all of our shortcomings and sins back into their original blessings.

Where is Jesus inviting you to follow him in worship, service and transformation?
Where is Jesus inviting you in evangelism? For the first four apostles, all of whom were fishermen, Jesus used the phrase: to fish for people. You have been focused on fishing for your life’s work. Now I will refocus your work to a different kind of life, a different way of living.

Jesus came into the world to seek the lost, to find the lost, to reunite the lost to God, and to transform the lost by the power of divine love.

Those who heed the invitation to repent and to follow are those whom Jesus transforms for evangelism. The particularity of evangelism is unique for each of us. The pre condition for evangelism is consistent. The universality of evangelism is the same: as you experience God’s blessing so share God’s blessing.
The reality of evangelism is in the words Jesus speaks to us today: Repent. Follow me. I will make you fish for people.