Read Matthew 4:18–22: If you are in school and you want to join a sports team you have to go through tryouts to prove yourself able to join the team. If you want to get a new job you have to interview for the position. This is how things work today, you have to prove your worth to someone and they choose to accept you or not based on how you did. However, when we look at God’s way of bringing people onto his team it is very different than society’s way.
Jesus in this passage in Matthew is just walking and he saw two brothers and he told them to come and follow him and then he kept going and he did it again. Instead of going to a job interview these four men were called by the Lord as they were working, as Jesus walked by on the road.
This is the opposite of what happens today in tryouts and interviews. Instead of people going to Jesus to join his team Jesus came to them and he called them. They were not qualified. They didn't have the skills, they were humble fishermen, perhaps they owned boats and they were good at what they did but they weren't rabbis. They hadn't gone through years of schooling under other rabbis to be equipped to serve God and the Jewish people. They were fishermen. Faithful fishermen but just fisherman. Jesus took these and other humble people who were not equipped and he called them to follow him, to learn from him, and to be equipped by him. Instead of proving themselves by their own skills Jesus selected them for reasons we don't know and then these people that he called he equipped them to be who he wanted them to be.
If you were to look at other ways that God called people to follow him we can see that God in the Old and New Testament selected special people for reasons we don't really understand at times outside of them being faithful and then he used them for many great things. The way that he calls people is often not how we would expect it to be. The calling comes from God when we don’t expect it. God calls people to himself and then once they have begun to follow him he calls them to do many things like caring for others, praying for them, making meals, teaching, leading worship, or so much more. God calls people in all sorts of capacities, and he often does it differently than we would expect.
Every single person who became a famous Christian started at the same point. They all started not knowing God and then choose to follow him. There's all sorts of steps along the way that change for every single person but the fruit of someone's life is only seen in the rear view. When the disciples got called they had no idea what God was going to use them for and the Legacy that they would leave. But they chose to say yes to pursue God anyways.
In your life you do not know the fullness of what God has called you to do but will you choose to always follow him and do whatever good works he has prepared for you to do? You have been called by Jesus and he will equip you to bear fruit as you continue to follow him. This week ask yourself, “What things am I doing to follow him?” “How is God calling me to follow him?”
