Foundation Stones #2: The Lord with the Apostles — Christ Within You

And Joe, I’ll pay any price, or almost any price for a good beginning. I don’t want a lousy beginning. By the way, I like this. This would make a good beginning right here. This is not a bad beginning. A room full of single brothers, young and extremely dumb. This is a good beginning. This is a good place. This would be a good place to have a beginning. Say amen to that. This is a good, this is a good place for a beginning. I’ll put all in order to have a beginning. I’ll make some brothers sip until they think nothing’s ever going to happen in order to be there from the beginning. It’s important that you be there at the beginning. The Son was with the Father from the beginning.

Now, as far as the Christian life being introduced into this realm, Jesus Christ was there from the beginning. He was there at the birth in Bethlehem. The Lord Jesus was there from the beginning. Therefore, He knew, He knew all about it. And as far as the first total maturity of a Christian, and that’s we’d call say is our Lord on the day He began His ministry, He’s more or less a mature Christian. He had been there from the beginning and watched that. So He knows how a Christian grows up. That’s an insignificant thing, but that’s exciting, that your Lord knows what it like to grow up into maturity as a Christian. Say amen. That’s exciting. That’s exciting.

Don’t think He’s ignorant of that. It happened to Him. He started out as a little baby and grew up to be a mature Christian. He knows what a Christian has to go through because He is one. Isn’t that wonderful that when you talk to your Lord and you fellowship with Him, He knows all about what you’re going through, cuz He’s once a human being and He had to grow up to be a Christian, too. I think that’s very encouraging. It really is. All right. Now, we come to a beginning and there are those who are there from the beginning. In fact, how could you be ranked as one of the 12? If you will go to an obscure little verse in Acts, you will find that when they went to replace Judas, there was one condition to be numbered as one of the 12. Now, what was it? You don’t know. You’ve never noticed.

You had to be there. You would have had to have been one of those who was there from the beginning. The only people from whom they selected out of a little group, well, they had about four or five men to choose from to take Judas’s place. The only men who could get in that little group were men who had to be one of those early ones called. It’s interesting that that there were more than 12 who were called to follow Him. Now He had a selectness in the fact that there were a few hundred and 70 and 20 and 12. But within that 20, you could hardly tell number 13 from number 12. They were people who had been with Him from the beginning.

Now this is not by their choice. This is by His choice. Now what’s the advantage of having been there from the beginning? You didn’t miss anything. That’s right. Does that mean anything to you at all? Would you like to sit under someone who’s been there from the beginning? That way you know He went through everything there was to go through. Right. If you ever get a chance, you should be there from the beginning. Don’t ever pass up an opportunity to be there from the very beginning. Be there at the beginning. Don’t miss nothing. Even if even if you have to wait a year or two or three or four, be there at the beginning if you possibly can.

Then you get to see everything that happens. You get to know how it’s done. Well, if you were to talk to one of the 12 and say to him, “Bro, what’s the first thing you ever learned about Jesus Christ?” And he said, “Why?” The first thing, he’d say, “Why the first thing I ever learned about Jesus Christ was how to call a disciple, cuz that’s the first thing that happened to me. I was sitting there minding my own business, paying attention to my own affairs, and walks up this man, and looks at me and says, “Put it down. Sell it. Get rid of it. Give it to your friends. Throw it away. Give it back to your daddy. Do something with it and come follow me. Praise the Lord. Has anyone ever done that to you?

I get, sometimes, I get, the overwhelming urge to do that. I really do because you are so stupid. Excuse me. You young brothers are so unutterably dumb. You will throw your life away on some of the most second grade stuff in the world. And I just want to walk by and say, “Forget the ethics of it, Gene. Forget that you don’t do this. Forget the arrogance of it. Just do it. And I just sometimes want to say to a young brother, and I have this feeling lot, lots of brothers, but mostly to brothers who think they’re going to grow up be a preacher or a Christian worker. I just want to look at him and say, “Leave the seminary, sell your car, and move here, and come follow me. I want to say it like that, and I don’t and I should because those brothers make such unbelievable mistakes. Unbelievable mistakes.

Jimmy, are you back there? Jimmy, if I were to walk by you and say to you, Jimmy, sell it all. Come follow me. Come follow me. Don’t give me an answer. Don’t give me an answer. What would you do, Jimmy? Don’t give me an answer now, just think about it. What would you do? I think Jimm would call a policeman. And yet, you know something, there was a time in my life when there was a man and I wanted him to say that to me and I think I would have done anything. I’d have shot my wife. I’d have given my children over to an orphanage. I would have burned my house down for the privilege of going with that brother. Don’t take me too seriously. And I would have wanted to and I would have been scared doing it and afraid that I would fail. But I wanted that. And that to me is discipleship.

Now that word discipleship’s been really hurt and ruined in in my generation. And I to me the proof that what is called discipleship today is not discipleship, is the Lord’s numbers that it covers. True discipleship cannot number over 12 or 15. There are followers, but discipleship is something that is not in my judgment, not a thing for all Christians, but I think discipling is someone specifically following a Christian for a specific purpose. A specific purpose. Not hundreds of them. Try to find out how many people got called disciples in the New Testament. And I think you will be surprised. We are not all disciples. The word doesn’t mean that. Anyway, I believe in discipling. I believe in in the very principles of it for all of us. But nonetheless, there was that tradition in the Hebrew faith in which a man gathered about him a small group of people. And Jesus Christ is doing this out of the organic nature that He has. He brings together a group of young men and some women, some young women or women. I don’t know how young they were, and He brings them to Himself, and they all are there with Him from the beginning.

Now, why would it be important to be with the Lord Jesus from the beginning? Yes. To have His viewpoint. That’s right. I will tell you why. So that, well, that’s true, isn’t it? If you missed a day you can drop back, you could you could miss a hundred years of ordinary human teaching and discipleship missing one day with Him. But I will tell you why. Because in their life, one day they too would be in a situation of beginning. And on the day that they are thrown into a beginning, they had better remember what the last beginning looked like and how it was done.

And when the Lord Jesus Christ said to those men, “Get rid of everything you’ve got and come follow me.” He was essentially doing what the Father had done with Him in eternity past. Was the Father not saying, “Let me be Your all.” Clothing did not exist, but He was essentially saying, “There’s nothing else. I am the eternal One and I will be Your all. And the Lord Jesus was saying to those men, I will be your everything. Forget the clothes, forget the fame, forget your home, forget your parents, and come and follow me.

He was moving in the steps, the footsteps of His Father. I’m going to say it again. He had a habit He couldn’t break, and He was reproducing it on earth with a group of men, and I am impressed. Now there is one great difference that I see here and that is when the Father picked His Son, He picked someone gloriously worthy. But when the Lord Jesus picked those 12 guys, He picked the bottom of barrel, and I think that also was a glory to the Son. Um, they were there from the beginning.