Week 5: Jesus Call His Disciples

Jesus Calls His First Disciples? | John 1:35-51
A Year in the Life of Jesus

If I were tasked with building a team to change the world, I know what my instinct would be. I would look for the best—those with talent, credibility, resources, and influence. That’s how most organizations operate. Whether in sports, business, or the arts, we assemble the most capable people we can find in order to accomplish the mission.

And yet, when Jesus begins to form His movement, He does something altogether different.

He gathers around Himself a group of people who, by most standards, would not make the cut. Fishermen with little formal education. Men with volatile personalities. A tax collector who collaborated with Rome. A zealot who likely despised Rome. Others who were skeptical, impulsive, or quietly unimpressive. It is not the kind of roster we would expect to carry a world-changing mission forward.

But that is precisely the point.

From the very beginning, the calling of Jesus reveals something essential about the nature of the gospel. Christianity is not fundamentally about the qualified finding Jesus. It is about Jesus calling and transforming the unqualified. The people He chooses are not finished products. They are people in process—people whose lives will be reshaped by their proximity to Him.

I was reminded of this a few years ago when a man visited our church for the first time. He was visibly anxious, even shaking as we spoke. Eventually, he admitted that he was afraid to be in a church building at all—that somehow the weight of his past might cause the whole place to collapse on him. It was a striking image, but also a revealing one. Many people assume that God is for those who have their lives together, that His presence is reserved for the polished and put-together.

But that assumption is the inverse of the story we find in Scripture.

The incarnation itself tells a different story. Jesus did not enter a world that had finally corrected itself. He entered a world marked by brokenness, confusion, and need. His coming was not a response to human progress, but to human helplessness. And in His own words, He makes His mission clear: He came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

That is the meaning of the call. It is an invitation extended to ordinary, flawed, and often unlikely people—people like us.

And yet, that invitation must be understood alongside what it actually entails. Because Jesus does not call people merely to admire Him. He calls them to follow Him.

In our cultural moment, the idea of “following” has been diluted. We follow people online. We follow teams or personalities. But when Jesus spoke those words, they carried a much deeper implication. To follow a rabbi in the first century meant to reorder your entire life around that teacher. It was not casual or occasional; it was comprehensive.

The language we might use today is apprenticeship.

To be a disciple was to live in close relationship with a master, to learn not only what they taught but how they lived. It meant being with them, becoming like them, and eventually doing what they did. This is the vision Jesus had for His disciples, and it remains His vision today.

This is why His later words about discipleship are so striking. When Jesus says that anyone who wants to follow Him must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow, He is clarifying the nature of the invitation. It is not an add-on to life as it already is. It is a reorientation of life altogether.

To deny oneself is to relinquish ultimate authority over one’s own life. To take up the cross is to embrace a path that may involve sacrifice, discomfort, and even suffering. And to follow Jesus is to give Him our allegiance in a way that shapes how we live, think, and act.

At first glance, this sounds like a heavy burden. But Jesus immediately reframes it. The one who seeks to preserve their life at all costs will ultimately lose it, while the one who entrusts their life to Him will find it. What feels like loss in the moment is, in reality, the path to true life.

This is the paradox at the heart of discipleship. The way of Jesus often runs counter to our instincts, yet it leads to the very things our souls long for—life, freedom, and wholeness.

So the question we are left with is not simply whether we believe in Jesus. It is whether we are actually following Him.

Are we arranging our lives around His presence? Are we being shaped by His character? Are we participating in His mission?

These are not questions meant to discourage us, but to invite us deeper. Because the same truth that defines the beginning of the call remains true throughout the journey: Jesus does not call the finished product. He calls people He intends to transform.