The Ministry: Nobody is Qualified

Luke 6:13

What were the qualifications to be chosen as an apostle? Ask the average churchgoer and they would say the bar must’ve been incredibly high. Only the best…holy, holy, holy! Ask a Catholic and they would tell you that Peter was the first pope and so the apostles had to have been Cardinals, Archbishops, etc. They surely started out as choirboys to eventually attain the papacy! They must’ve been strict monks secluded away from all worldly influence, having taken a vow of silence. I’ll tell you one thing, if anyone could have benefited from such a vow it was Peter!

And yet just a glance at these disciples reveals that God’s qualifications were quite different. It wasn’t about who they were as much as who they WEREN’T! Jesus disdained self-righteousness and pride. He looked for simple, sincere learners…clay willing to be shaped. He wanted someone who truly believed in Him…and then HE would make all the difference necessary in them.

We all understand the word "qualified."  That's a word that's used an awful lot in the English language, particularly in our society, which has set standards and qualifications for almost every enterprise.  There are qualifications for jobs, qualifications for schools, for professions, for drivers' licenses, for credit cards, for loans, and on and on it goes.  The highest paying jobs, at least on the surface, demand some qualifications in the area of personality or character, skill, education, experience, self-motivation, social interaction, intelligence, stress management, and other qualifications.  We have learned in society that to do certain things, you need somebody who is qualified, somebody who has the aptitude, the skill, the experience or whatever.

And the Bible is very clear that God's standard for those who are most responsible for His eternal work are indeed extremely high.  In fact, just take being a pastor in the church, and in 1 Timothy chapter 3 we learn that someone who wants to do that task must be above reproach, a one-woman man, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to wine or pugnacious [quick to argue], gentle, uncontentious, free from the love of money, must manage his own household well, keep his children under control.  Now he must not be a new convert or unproven in ministry so that he would become conceited and fall into the condemnation of the devil, must have a good reputation with those outside the church so that he doesn't fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

In Titus chapter 1 a similar list is given. One who would be a pastor or leader in the church must be above reproach, and blameless. Hebrews 13:7 says they have to live exemplary lives.  Their faith has to be the kind that you can follow.  You can’t ask any church people to do something the leaders aren’t doing. It would hold back God’s blessing. And they have to give an account to God for how they conduct themselves. I would rather be in  man’s hands than God’s. I shake in my boots!

And that's the standards for those who lead in the church only because they're to be the model of God's standard for everybody else.  God doesn't lower the standard with the rest of us.  He says this is the standard for the leaders because we have to manifest the standard for everybody else.  In fact, if you want to know what the ultimate qualification is, Matthew 5:48, Jesus said, "Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect."

Frankly, nobody qualifies.  Humanly speaking, nobody measures up.  Nobody qualifies to be in God's kingdom, nobody qualifies to be in God's service.  Scripture is very clear that nobody on his own can meet the least of God's standards.  All have sinned and come short of God's glory.  There's none righteous, no not one, Romans 3 says.

And even after Paul had become an Apostle and been an Apostle and was in the middle of his ministry, it was Paul who confessed, "I know nothing good dwells in me, that is in my flesh," Romans 7:18. And he said in 1 Timothy 1:15, "I'm the chief of sinners."  Amazing.

Well, you can see, God has a problem.  There are no qualified people.  And so an amazing aspect of God's grace is that He must save sinners, He must sanctify sinners, and then He must work His ministry through the unworthy and the unqualified.  It’s very encouraging to meet the twelve because, like all the rest of us, they are selected from the unworthy and the unqualified.  They're like Elijah, that great prophet, so mightily used of God.  And James reminds us in James 5:17, that Elijah had the same kind of nature [like passions] that we have, he's just like us.  He didn't rise to the heights of usefulness to God because he was different than we are. Neither did Paul. 

God doesn't really have a choice, He either uses the unworthy and the unqualified or He does it Himself.  But God has chosen to bring sinners saving grace and sanctifying grace, and then serving grace, transforming the unworthy and the unqualified into useful servants.  And we're going to learn that as we look at these apostles.

I think we are tempted to become discouraged when our spiritual life and witness suffer because of our sins and our failures and we think that we're nobodies and we're nothing.  You know, we crawl up a few steps and it's kind of three steps forward, two steps back and we battle temptation and we wonder how it is that God could ever use us.  Well, we're all the same and those are the kind of people God uses because that's all He has to work with.

His use of the apostles testifies to the fact that God can use the unworthy and the unqualified.  He can use the nobodies.  They turned the world upside down, these twelve, but they did not turn the world upside-down because they were extraordinarily talented, or because they were naturally gifted, or because they were supremely educated or uniquely influential, or because they had achieved heights of social status.  They did not turn the world upside-down because they were massive intellects.  It was rather in spite of all their human limitations, in spite of everything that they were not, that God used them, because it was when they recognized they were nothing they surrendered themselves to God, whose power is always perfected in weakness.  There are many people who are too confident to be of any use to God, or too proud to be usable.

So God picks the humble, the lowly, the meek and the weak so that there's never any question about the source of power when their lives change the world.  It's not the man. It's the truth of God and the power of God in the man.  I want to remind preachers today of this.  It's not their cleverness, it's not their personality.  The power is in the Word, not in us. 

The history of God's work on earth is the story of His using the unqualified and the twelve were no exception to that.  They became great preachers, healers, expellers of demons, and writers of the New Testament.  They were the real foundation of the church, according to Ephesians 2:20.  They were the agents of divine revelation, according to Ephesians 3:5.  They were the teachers of true doctrine, according to Acts 2:42.  In Ephesians 4:11 it tells us they were the builders of the church.  They are called holy apostles in Ephesians 3:5 and Revelation 18:20.  They were examples of godliness.  And they were granted the ability to do mighty signs and wonders, according to 2 Corinthians 12:11-12.  These very plain, common men were elevated to an uncommon calling.

They were Galileans.  They were not the elite.  Galileans were the low class, rural, uneducated, as far away as you could get from the literate and the educated in Jerusalem.  And here they begin their formal training.  They begin their internship.  It's very necessary.  Only two years from this point Jesus will be crucified, three days later He will rise, forty days later He will ascend to heaven and they will be on their own and the gospel will be in their hands and the kingdom of God will depend on their ministry.  Only two years’ time is left to prepare them and so right here we begin the training of the twelve.

Here’s some general observations about the list.  There are four lists of the apostles in the New Testament; Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts; [Matthew 10, Mark 3, here Luke 6 and Acts chapter 1.]  In these lists the names are always the same, so that we know exactly who these twelve were. 

The first name in all four lists is always Peter.  And there are three groups of four. 

The first group is Simon called Peter, Andrew, James, John.  In every list they are the first four. 

Group two is always the same, Philip, Bartholomew [Nathanael], Matthew, Thomas, that's always group two in every list.  Philip is always the first name of group two.

Group three: James the son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, Judas son of James [Thaddeus or Lebbaeus], and Judas Iscariot. James the son of Alphaeus is always the first name in group four and Judas is always the last name of the twelve.

These groups of four are in decreasing intimacy from Christ; group one always around Christ; Peter, James, John and Andrew, the most intimate group. They were the first disciples that Jesus called back in John chapter 1 verse 35 to 42, the first group He called to be disciples, and who here he identifies as apostles.  They've been with Him the longest and they are the most intimate with Christ.  And throughout the rest of the story of the ministry and life of Christ, Peter, James and John in particular are very intimate with Christ, and Andrew is close. 

Group two is a little bit more distant but we do know quite a bit about Philip and Bartholomew and Thomas and Matthew.  Group three seems at a distance.  We don't know much about them at all.  The only thing we know is about Judas because he betrayed Jesus. 

So Jesus had twelve, but He could only have very intimately three and sometimes four and they kind of move away in terms of intimacy. It does tell us that even a group of twelve is too much for one person to handle at an equal level of intimacy.  You can't be everything to everybody.

They had varied temperaments.  Peter... We call him the apostle with the foot-shaped mouth, eager, bold, aggressive, impulsive, very verbal.  John on the other hand spoke very little.  The first twelve chapters of Acts he and Peter are companions. But John never says a thing.

There is Nathanael-Bartholomew, a true believer, openly confessing his faith in Christ.  And he's sort of matched up with Thomas who is a skeptic and a doubter and has to have proof for everything.

Their politics were different.  There was Matthew called also Levi.  Matthew was the most despicable person in Israel as a tax collector. And then there’s Simon called Zealot.  The Zealots were those who hated Rome. That was the name of a group of people in Israel who wanted to throw off the Roman yoke.  Many of them were terrorists.  Some of them were called sicarii because they carried around a sica, which is a sword and they went around stabbing Romans in the back.  So apart from the presence of Christ, Simon may well have stuck a spear in the back of Matthew. But Jesus made all the difference in these unqualified men. He changed them, and they changed the world. He turned them upside down and they did the same everywhere they went.