Matthew 9: The Harvest Is Plentiful

Matthew chapter 9.

Up until this point in our journey through Matthew, and maybe we've got another year or two in the book of Matthew at this rate.

Up until this point, Jesus has been the one doing all the ministry.

He's been the one healing people, proclaiming the good news, driving out demons.

And in Matthew chapter 9, this is the pivotal turning point where Jesus begins to hand over responsibility to his disciples.

They are now to take an active role in the mission and the ministry of Jesus in Galilee and beyond.

These next few chapters are all about discipleship and what it requires of us as disciples of Jesus living in the world.

I'm just going to give you a heads up that the focus for the next year is is going to be discipleship, working to equip and release us all together to grow as disciples of Jesus who go out and serve his mission in the world and make more disciples.

And this is the model that we see Jesus doing.

And this is from John C. Maxwell.

He's a bit of a Christian leadership guru.

And this is what he calls the apprenticeship model.

And this is what we see Jesus doing in the scriptures.

It starts off with I do.

Then it moves to I do and you watch.

It moves to the next step of you do and I watch.

Then finally you do it and then you do it with someone else watching.

This is what we see Jesus doing throughout his ministry in the Gospels.

This is what we see the disciples doing later on when they take up the mantle of Jesus' mission in the world and they start to make more disciples.

And I want us to have this in the back of our minds today as we come to Matthew 9 and especially next week when we go to Matthew chapter 10, because this is what we see Jesus doing.

They've been following him around everywhere, seeing him drive out demons, seeing him healing people, seeing him teaching and proclaiming the gospel.

And now is this pivotal moment where they are going to step three, where Jesus is saying, hey, I want you guys to start doing something.

It's an exciting time for the disciples.

Imagine if you were one of them.

It'd be a scary time as well.