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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
Have you ever heard the word disciple before? It comes up a lot in the New Testament. Maybe you think there were only twelve disciples. Were all disciples men? What does the word even mean? What did Jesus have to say about disciples and why He had them in the first place? Was Jesus the only person to ever have disciples? Is disciple a noun or is it an action word? Are you a disciple of Jesus or are you not quite sure? What should we think of when we hear the word disciple? What words did Jesus say about what it takes to be one of His disciples? So many questions. This week we’re going to talk about this very important topic because in your life, nothing is more important than becoming a disciple of Jesus so you’d better know what that means and what it doesn’t mean.
First of all, in the Bible, a disciple was a student of a teacher but it was also way more than that. You guys have teachers, right? But you aren’t their disciples. I have had many teachers in my life but I wasn’t a disciple of any of them because a disciple is only going to have one teacher. But even if you are homeschooled and you only have one teacher, you still aren’t a disciple of your parents or whoever is teaching you because the relationship between a disciple and their teacher was a very special and unique one. When a person became a disciple of a great Bible teacher, they had one goal in mind and it wasn’t just learning the Bible. Boys learned the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, in school beginning at the age of five if they had a local place to learn (many didn’t) and maybe when they were older, if they were very smart and worked hard to memorize everything then a Rabbi (a great teacher of the Bible) might choose them to go on to the next level where they would have to learn the entire Bible—even memorizing the whole thing! And the best of the best at that might get chosen to be the disciples of a great Rabbi. But most never would and they would go back home and work with their fathers in the family business. With Peter, Andrew, James, and John that meant going back to the fishing boats. Very few would be chosen for the jobs of studying the Bible for the rest of their lives. Oh, and remember, none of the books of the New Testament were written yet and so they were only studying the parts of the Bible in Hebrew and Aramaic and the translations into Greek. They would also know about some of the “what if” stories that were popular at the time, like I Enoch and Jubilees and the Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres and quotes from them actually make it into the New Testament because it was part of their context. They also quoted Greek Philosophers—which is what I want to talk to you about next.
Have you ever heard of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates? They all lived long before Jesus was born and they were all great teachers and thinkers. In fact, they had disciples. That’s right, teachers and disciples aren’t something Jewish—the Jews got the idea from watching the Greek teachers and their students and because it was an excellent way to learn philosophy and philosophy is a way of thinking about everything. Philosophy can be good or bad but it is about how people should live based on what they believe. That’s why Josephus, a Jewish priest who lived right after Jesus, called all the Jewish ways of thinking about life philosophies. If we are followers of Jesus, then we use everything He said and did to shape the way we do things and think about things and that becomes our philosophy. But the way students and teachers behaved in the ancient Greek world could be kinda messed up, okay? There are lots of stories about how the students of one teacher (philosopher) would compete with the students of another philosopher. And they would make fun of other teachers to make their own teacher look good. In fact, one time there was a guy making fun of a teacher in front of that guy’s disciples, his students, and their disciples got so angry that they thrashed the kid and killed him. Bet no one made fun of their teacher ever again. But that’s how serious the Greeks were about their Philosophy teachers. Of course, Jesus didn’t put up with that sort of nonsense, as we will talk about later.
Two of the most famous Rabbis by the time of Jesus were named Hillel and Shammai and they fought about how the Jews should live out the words of the Bible. Whenever Jesus was talking to the Pharisees, he was talking to the disciples of Hillel and Shammai or, probably, the disciples of their disciples because they had both been dead for quite a while. Someone like Gamaliel, who was the grandson of Hillel. The Apostle Paul was a disciple of Gamaliel before he became a disciple of Jesus. Which brings us to why your choice of teacher was so very important—the goal of a disciple was to become just like their teacher. They were supposed to stay with their teacher all day every day, learning from them and sleeping and eating at their house. In fact, you were supposed to love your teacher more than you loved your parents because all your parents did was give you life but your teacher, your rabbi, gave you the Bible. So, you needed to choose the rabbi whom you most wanted to be like and you asked to be their disciple and they either said no or yes—but you couldn’t just pay to go to school with the rabbi, it wasn’t like that. You were making a decision to study the Bible and to become a wise Jewish sage, a great thinker, for the rest of your life and when you did, you were supposed to get students of your own and they would learn to be like you the way you learned to be like your rabbi. And so these teachers and their disciples would often argue with Jesus and especially when what He was teaching was different from what they were teaching. They all read the exact same Bible but Jesus had a much different way of looking at some things. Human beings read the Bible and we interpret it—which means that we decide what it means. We do that with every single verse. Sometimes we are right and sometimes we are wrong and sometimes it’s a little bit of both but what we never are is always right. But Jesus was always right because He knows everything about the Bible and about God. He wasn’t giving opinions like you and I do—He was just flat out telling the absolute truth.
This is why Jesus told everyone not to call anyone else a rabbi because there was only one true rabbi and that’s Himself. Jesus is the only person we should ever try to totally be like. Everyone else is messed up some way or another. I am pretty messed up so even though I am teaching you the Bible, you aren’t my disciples. Instead, I am teaching you to be Jesus’s disciples. If you become like me, then you are going to get some things really wrong and I won’t always be the best example but Jesus is always right and always behaves perfectly in whatever situation He finds Himself in. No one else you will ever meet can say the same thing. Jesus told people to follow Him, and He is telling us that too. But what did it mean to follow a rabbi? It meant to walk so closely behind your rabbi, your teacher, that you would be covered with the dust he was kicking up with his sandals as he walked along. It meant listening to your rabbi, learning what he knows and doing what he does and being with your rabbi always. It meant acting just like your rabbi so the things that come out of your mouth are exactly what would come out of his mouth. No wonder Jesus said that He is the only person to follow that closely. Everyone else will lead us in the wrong directions sometimes even if they don’t want to. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn from me or another teacher, but it means that we aren’t who you need to become like. If we are good teachers and not just smart know-it-alls, then we are becoming more and more like Jesus and we will teach you how to do that too by telling you what Jesus did and said and taught. I don’t want any of you to be like me, but like Jesus. One of me is more than enough!
Do you remember when Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee and He saw Peter, Andrew, James, and John and He told them to leave their boats and nets and to come with Him so He could teach them to catch people instead of fish? Well, that would have been a big surprise. Rabbis didn’t ask anyone to be a disciple. It was the job of a young person to ask the Rabbi if he could be a disciple and the Rabbi could then say yes or no. It would be embarrassing for a rabbi to ask a young person to be their student and have that person say no, so if you wanted to follow a rabbi, you had to stir up the courage to ask them yourself and risk them saying no. But Jesus was out there saying, “Follow me,” to complete strangers and some went and some didn’t. Remember the man who needed to bury the bones of his father? We talked about him last week and how that might mean he couldn’t go for another year. Or the guy who said he needed to say goodbye to his family first? Yeah, that was strange and probably their moms would be irritated with them because it was a great honor to be asked by a rabbi to become their disciple. It was like a scout for the Pittsburgh Steelers came to your high school and asked you to come straight to the NFL and not to even go to college first. Okay, maybe that’s a bad example because if you are that good then you aren’t going to have to pay for college and your mom would probably smack you down if you went and played professional football when you could have gone to college free first. Yeah, just ignore that bad example. This is why you need to follow Jesus because all of His examples are great. But if a big time college came and offered you free college tuition and room and food and all that and you said no then your mom might smack you and good! Being asked to follow a rabbi is just like that in the first century Jewish world. A free ride to college and a guaranteed career after that.
But that’s what Jesus meant when He said that anyone who was going to follow Him had to hate their mother and father. He wasn’t telling anyone to hate their parents or to break the fifth commandment! He was saying that if they were going to follow Him, learn from Him so that they would be exactly like Him, they would have to love Him like the disciples had to love their rabbis—more than their parents. The reward for being a disciple of Jesus isn’t only Bible study and learning to live well, it is eternal life. It’s living forever here on earth with Jesus as King of kings and Lord of lords. And can I say that what I want more than anything in the world is for my kids to love Jesus so much that they want to be exactly like Him even if it means they are nothing like me! That they would look at me and they would say, “I love mom, but she sure isn’t Jesus. I can see things that my mom does wrong and so I had better follow Jesus instead and become His disciple.” So, my kids should reject and refuse to do the things I do wrong but they don’t have to reject anything about Jesus. They can love Him and follow Him in ways that they couldn’t ever love and follow me and if I ever made them choose between me and Jesus, I hope they would choose Jesus instead, no matter what. Loving Jesus and following Him doesn’t mean actually hating people, it just means that we have to choose Him first and be totally loyal to Him before anyone else. Even moms and dads. Jesus tells us to love our enemies and so it isn’t like He is going to tell us to hate our family! It was just a way of talking about being a disciple, a student, and a follower.
Peter thought that he should be the kind of disciple we talked about earlier—you know, those kids who beat that other kid to death for making fun of their teacher. When Jesus was arrested, Peter (well, I think it was probably Peter anyway even though it doesn’t say) took the knife he brought for killing the Passover lamb and actually cut off a dude’s ear. Jesus was like, “Dude, put that thing away.” And later, when Jesus was talking to the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate (who was a very wicked man), He told Pilate that if he was the king over a kingdom that came from this world, that all of His disciples would pick up weapons and fight for Him. But Jesus didn’t play by the rules of human kings. That really confused Pontius Pilate because that wasn’t how things worked in Rome—or anywhere. No one was willing to just die without putting up a fight and especially if they were a king! But that’s a good example of why we have to pay attention to Jesus because a lot of people will try to fool you into doing things that Jesus said no one should do—not even to save His life.
Remember when I said that the job of a disciple was to learn to be just like his teacher? Well, when we want to find out what that looks like, we can go to the Sermon on the Mount, which Matthew wrote about. Jesus was telling His disciples and anyone else who wanted to follow Him as a disciple exactly what His Kingdom looks like and how much they will need to change their thinking to be part of it. Another good word for disciple would be apprentice, because an apprentice is someone who is learning a job from someone who is an expert in that job. An apprentice is someone who learns how to do the same things that the expert does, so that when he leaves or the expert dies, he can go and do the same things. And Jesus talked about that a lot—that we need to do what He did and that we would do even greater things. We aren’t God, like He is, but He isn’t here preaching anymore or walking around healing the sick or doing what is right. He spent three years walking around and living with His disciples and not just the famous twelve who were closest to Him. We know of at least seventy-two men and women who followed Him around as He taught, learning how He lived, what He thought, what was important to Him all day every day. And on the day of Pentecost, there were 120 disciples because his brothers finally came around as well as some other people who believed that He rose from the dead or because He had appeared to them. When Jesus told them, “Follow me,” He was telling them to watch Him carefully, learn from Him, and become like Him so that when they went out into the world, they could show people what He is like. Just like all the disciples/students of all the rabbis and philosophers. The Bible tells us that Jesus selected a special twelve to be close to Him because He wanted to be with them and for them to be with Him—because they would have a lot to learn about life. Jesus wasn’t like anyone else and they had to learn enough in just three years to become very different people who saw the world in a very different way.
If a person wanted to be a blacksmith, they had to learn from a blacksmith as an apprentice. Hundreds of years ago in America, boys from poor families could earn their way on a ship across the ocean by selling themselves as apprentices to craftsmen like carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors, masons, and all sorts of other trades. The expert would teach the boy everything they knew and the boy would work for free until his years of service were over. And when he left, he could move somewhere else and make a living. Sons usually were apprentices in their father’s work and they would take over the family business later. But it wasn’t just like going to college and maybe getting a degree that you never use because they were training for a useful skill that they would use every day for the rest of their lives. My sons both went to a technical careers high school where Andrew learned how to be an amazing welder and Matthew learned Computer Programming. Andrew had a bad accident and so he ended up getting his Certified Nursing Assistant certificate and now he works in health care, and Matt decided to go to college and get a degree in Criminal Justice. But, hundreds of years ago, they would have both just kept on in the same careers that they had learned—only, not welding and computer programming, obviously. And in Jesus’s day and also when my ancestors came here from Ireland before the Revolutionary War, when they were probably poor apprentices. Our job is like theirs would have been, only instead of just whatever we end up doing as a job—like I teach—we are also supposed to live our entire lives as apprentices of Jesus. Even though we never got to spend time with Him face to face, which would be so cool, we do have our Bibles telling us what He said and did and when we accept Jesus as our King for real, the Holy Spirit comes and helps us little by little to become more and more like Jesus. We are apprentices to the Holy Spirit as the Holy Spirit teaches us the job of being like Jesus and doing what He did and saying what He said. Pretty cool, huh?
I love you. I am praying for you. Are you apprentices of Jesus? Are you going to show the world what Jesus looks like as an artist, or a musician, or a nurse, or a police-officer, a parent, a farmer, or a website designer? I sure hope so. We can show the world who God doing just about any job. And as soon as you make Jesus your King, He’s going to go to work getting you ready. He loves you.
At the very end of the Gospel of Matthew, in Chapter 28, Jesus is getting ready to leave the earth and leave the disciples. It’s forty days after He rose from the dead, and the time has come to go and be with His Father—and according to John, He says that unless He goes away, the Holy Spirit can’t come to be with the disciples. Jesus can only be in one place at a time because He has a human body—even though it is perfect—but the Holy Spirit can be everywhere and anywhere all at the same time. The Spirit that is with me is the Spirit that is with you and there is no difference. I don’t get more and you don’t get less. Maybe you will be better at hearing the Spirit than I am but that doesn’t mean the Spirit isn’t talking to us all the time. If Jesus is your King, like He’s my King and I have given my life to Him for Him to use me however He wants for as long as He wants—if He is your King then you are my brothers and sisters. Not younger brothers and sisters, not junior brothers and sisters, but 100% my brothers and sisters. You will grow up and do different things and God will give you different gifts so that you can show the world about Jesus through the things you can do. I can teach, and some of my friends can preach. The Holy Spirit tells my husband Mark how to fix complicated things and make stuff work. And you might say that doesn’t count but of course it does. We need things to work and God fixes things by using my husband and so it is important that Mark acts as much like Jesus as possible. It isn’t enough to just be a wiz at fixing and building stuff.