Introduction, Part 1 | Matthew 17

welcome to the daily disciple podcast where we seek daily to be with and to become like jesus hello everyone this is todd volker i'm glad to be with you on today's podcast we're in a series called be here the story of god and it's really looking at the fact that god is with us that that jesus is emmanuel god with us and that god is present he's not distant but he's close and i want to talk a little bit about kind of my story first how i got started in outreach ministry how i started to learn to pray for people on the street and focus on outreach outside the walls of the church and it really began when i was in school when i was in training for ministry one of my assignments was to spend a week living among the poor and this was an assignment i really didn't want to do i really felt uncomfortable about this i fact asked my professor if i could have an alternate assignment but he said no i really needed to do this and so i spent a week at an inner city ministry called the city of refuge and we would spend most of the time ministering to people on the street we would give out food and clothing we went to the poorest parts of town and just try to meet needs of people and i was really out of my comfort zone the whole time but one event took a place that really changed things for me and that was one night the leader of the of the ministry said um tonight i want to go find this guy that lives behind an abandoned warehouse and i want to see if he needs any food or if he needs some blankets and i need a couple people to go with me because it's really not safe on the street at night to go by yourself so i went with him with another student and we got to the place where this guy was behind a chain link fence and he called back and said hey we got some food and some blankets if you need them and the guy yelled back well i don't really need that but are you guys christians and he said yes he said good because i've been praying that god would bring me some fellowship so we went through the gate and we found him sitting on a cardboard box spread out and he had his shopping cart next to him and what he really just wanted to do was to pray with us and to worship out there in that setting and so as we prayed and began to sing i experienced god in a way that i had never experienced god in the church god's presence came in a in a very powerful intangible way and after a while i couldn't sing anymore i could just weep in the presence of god sitting on a cardboard box and sitting in the open with these believers just worshiping jesus and and being together in his presence and that event and a few others really directed my ministry to begin to outreach people on the street i i started a need prayer booth where i put up a sign on a pop-up tent that just said need prayer question mark and people would come by and i would pray for them and that's about 14 years ago that i begun that ministry and god has done some amazing incredible things the reason i share that story is to get to the the point of god being close the god being near that that he is with us that he's here that he wants to draw near to people he wants to use us to reveal his glory his his presence to others so in the next four days i'm going to just talk briefly about ways in which god can manifest his presence his glory through us and through our ministry and today i just want to talk a little bit about outreach and how jesus does that as illustrated by that story i just told you about how i got started but the text that i want to use from the scripture today is in matthew 17 and it's it's what's known as the transfiguration of jesus and this is an account that's in all three of the synoptic gospels and you probably know the story but basically jesus takes his three best friends his closest friends peter james and john up on a mountain and as they're on that mountain suddenly jesus's appearance is changed it's it's transfigured before him he shines with radiant glory it's like the veil of who jesus was and his full deity is pulled away from him for a moment and the disciples can see jesus for who he truly is and then moses and elijah show up and they speak with jesus on the mountain moses represents the law and elijah represents the prophets and they're speaking with jesus on the mountain and the disciples don't know what to do and in fact it says that they were terrified and and peter kind of freaks out and says you we need to build three tents one for you lord one for elijah and one for moses and as he's saying this a cloud descends upon the mountain and the father in heaven speaks just as he did at jesus's baptism and he says this is my beloved son listen to him you know this must have blown the disciples away when they heard that voice from heaven all they could do is fall to their face fall to the ground in the presence of the god of all glory being revealed in the very presence what an incredible event to witness we've been looking at the truth that god is not distanced but he's present with us that he has come to earth that he's accomplished this drawing near through the person of christ through his death his resurrection from the dead that jesus made it possible for us to draw near to god and experience his presence in a real intangible way and he wants us to take his presence with us not just into church on sunday morning but everywhere we go in the street in the marketplace in the workplace in our schools wherever we go that we can bring the presence of god so i'm going to be talking to you over the next few days about ways that you can do this but when we ask the question in what ways has god revealed himself to us and how does he want us to reveal him to others we need to take a look at the ways that this can happen so i'm going to talk to you about that i'm going to talk to you about how to use the idea of praying for other people in order to draw them near to god so praying for people can reveal and make manifest the person of christ i want to talk about healing how that jesus taught and trained his disciples to pray for the sick and how in in doing healing that jesus has made manifest to others and then finally i want to talk about the gift of prophecy how jesus is revealed and made manifest as we speak the very words of god the things that god puts on our heart that he wants us to share with other people that opens their heart to the love of god that god wants to reveal himself through the gift of prophecy as well so we're going to be talking and exploring some of those ideas in the days to come we'll talk again soon thanks for listening to the daily disciple podcast we truly hope that you were encouraged by it today now if you'd like to support or if you have any questions about the daily disciple podcast feel free to contact us through our inland vineyard church app we'll give you information on our ministries and our sunday services and you can find us in the apple and google play app stores and we also have 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