Beginnings & The Twelve – How Jesus Trained the Twelve Disciples

I want to come into this just a little bit closer, this relationship between Christ and the twelve, but first I would like to go on and review a little bit more about yesterday morning. During the first year and a half, there is the sweeping spectacular: the healings, the miracles, the signs, the wonders. Is that necessary? Say yes to that, would you please? If a man does not see it, he will be damaged somewhere in his life. Did they do it? The twelve, did they do it? No. For the first year and a half, they did not. They only watched. They only watched.

I know our concepts about evangelism and healing and casting out demons and all of those things. I wish you’d stick around this week. I want to put everything in its proper order. I don’t want to take anything from you. I will never do that. I don’t deny a verse of Scripture. I don’t back away from anything. By God’s mercy, I will try never to, but I would put it in perspective. Christ first learned to be human, balanced, and lived by the Father, who was performing the miracles. The twelve watched, and they learned Christ.

Then He draws them to Himself. He gets them around Him very intimately. He begins to leave the masses, but He knows these brothers’ needs. You know, we’ve got to recognize the need of a brother to do some of these things. We’ve got dominion. We’ve got dominion. What are we doing sitting around here if we’ve got dominion? And pretty soon it just gets inside of you. If we’ve got dominion, why don’t we do something? Do you understand what I’m talking about? You get edgy. Let’s go. We’ve got dominion. Why are we messing around here, letting people run all over us like this? Have you had that feeling? Yes, you have. You have authority. We have the power. The church has power and authority. Why are we letting these people do such and such?” The Lord said, “Okay. All right. I’ll let you.

Praise God; the vessel couldn’t take it, brothers. The vessel could not take it. They thought they could, but they couldn’t. It’s okay. The Lord said, ‘Go anyway.’ The Lord let them make mistakes, and real growth came out of it. He gathered seventy of them together and said, ‘Take off.’ And boy, they went out preaching everywhere. People heard the gospel and rejoiced. It was probably the highest moment in human history. I’m not taking away from it one bit. I want you to know it was one of the highest moments, if not the highest moment in human history, because for the first time since the fall, men went out and exercised power over Satan.

Now, finally, Satan had somebody over him, and it wasn’t God; it was a man. When those fellows came running back in to give their report, Scripture says Jesus Christ looked into heaven and said something not said any time previously in the New Testament. He said, ‘I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven…and earth,’ and because twelve men, or seventy men, had gone out and they had bested Satan, a man now had dominion over Satan. Men had dominion over Satan, and this is Satan’s territory…no longer. The earth is Satan’s territory, but not any longer. ‘I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth.’ And it said even the Lord Jesus rejoiced.

Now, here’s one of those paradoxes. You can catch even the Lord in a switch here, if you will. It says He rejoiced, but they came in, and they went out of their minds.  He said, ‘Fellows, if you’re going to rejoice, rejoice that your name is written in the Book of Life.’ He comes back to the center. It is a matter of life, not power. Over and over, He comes back and brings them to life. Know Me. Live by Me. Life. The growth of life is so necessary.

Now, brother, I will not push the matter, but I would like for us to get the tendency, and here’s the tendency. Okay, as far as I know, besides those two things, I can tell you everything that the twelve disciples did for three and a half years. One, on one occasion, they passed out food to five thousand men. Two, they went out on a visit as twelve men in six pairs, and on another occasion they went out with fifty-eight other men. And during the last week, two of them went out and rented a donkey. I cannot recall any other real acts of service that those men performed during those three and a half years. What they did was watch, learn, and know during that time.

I will say this, though. You’ve got to watch real carefully. When they came back, they did report. They did fellowship about what had happened. They got carried away, but they did report. They always came back to fellowship together about what had happened. Now, there’s something of the church there. We share our experiences of the Lord and what He has done. So I wish to kind of balance what I’ve just said. They came back and shared together.

Now we’ve got to look a little bit closer at these twelve men. We must, because, brothers, these twelve men contain so many things the church today must know if we are going to be fully mature and fully restored.

I would like you to see what the Lord did. One thing He did was pick twelve men. Now that may seem highly insignificant. To me, it is not. Yesterday I said one significant thing is those who were there from the beginning. A dear brother introduced me to the principle of first things some years ago. Anytime the Lord does something as a new beginning, this brother said to me, ‘Those who are in it on the ground floor have been specially selected by the Lord.’ That’s all he said. Well, these men were there on the ground floor.

Okay, here is another thing, and that is the twelve. The twelve. All of you are familiar with certain group sizes in the New Testament. There is the “one” size group. That is always something of God, divinity, the Lord. What is the “two” size group? What’s the two-size group, brothers? Yes, I would say okay, that’s correct. I’m going to walk down another road besides that one. Two is always a witness. The two is a witness. Today we’re familiar with the “one.” We’re familiar with the two. We’re familiar with the hundred, the hundred and twenty, and the thousand, but we don’t know much about the twelve-size group.

Now then, I haven’t read a book on some method. Is there a twelve-size group throughout the New Testament? Throughout the whole New Testament. I wouldn’t give you a can of beans for it if it’s just in the Gospels, but is it throughout the New Testament, the twelve-size group?  Yes. Definitely, there’s a twelve-person group throughout the New Testament, both as it relates to the church and to this matter of servants; the Lord bringing forth servants.