prayer

In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon who was called the Zealot, and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. And he came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. And those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all the crowd sought to touch him, for power came out from him and healed them all. (Luke 6:12-19, ESV)

There are a lot of things in this passage we probably miss, because we think we know the story.

Jesus called His disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles…

We think the apostles and the disciples are the same. But here we see there were many more than 12 disciples, and from this large group Jesus chose 12 and made them the apostles.

Now I like to think of all of us as both disciples and apostles because of the meaning of the words. Disciple in the original Greek means learner, and apostle is one who is sent. We are all learning from Jesus (I hope!) and Jesus sends us all. But before you can be sent you must learn. So we must first be a learner from Jesus before He will send us…

But to me the most interesting thing and something we probably miss here is the first line. We want to be sent, but before we can be sent we have to learn, and before we can learn we have to listen. And how do we listen?

We pray.

We spend time in relationship with Jesus…

And here in the first line of our text, Jesus went out to the mountain to pray and commune with God, and He was not there for 5 minutes, or even an hour, but He was there all night! He continued in prayer all night before He chose whom He was going to send.

What an example of how we should be communing with God.

So pray and listen.