Twelve Whom He Named Apostles - a podcast by Rev. W. Reid Hankins

Sermon preached on Luke 6:12-16 by Rev. W. Reid Hankins during the Morning Worship Service at Trinity Presbyterian Church (OPC) on 09/26/2021 in Novato, CA.















Sermon Manuscript







Today’s passage is a short and sweet passage the is nonetheless full of rich significance for the foundation and establishing the church under the new covenant. What Jesus does here has ramifications for what we find later in the book of Acts after Jesus ascended up into heaven in the formation of the early Christian church. Yet even before that, we see Jesus training and preparing these twelve for the gospel proclamation that he would be having them to do. And still today, their apostolic ministry has ongoing significance for us today, as we will discuss.







Let us begin in our first point for today by looking at Jesus’ all-night prayer. That’s how our passage begins. He goes up to a mountain, finds some solitude, and prays through the night. That’s verse 12, “an all night he continued in prayer to God.” This word for “all night” in verse 12, is just one word in the Greek. It is the only place this Greek word appears in the Bible. The word is extraordinary. Praying through the night is extraordinary – even for Jesus.







Of course, surely the context tells us why Jesus spent the night with his heavenly father in prayer. Surely it was in light of what he was going to do the next day. He was choosing his special twelve disciples, also known as, apostles. Probably closely related to this is the famous sermon that he will then go on to preach right after me makes that selection. Luke records what is sometimes called the Sermon of the Plain but is likely an abbreviated version of the same Sermon on the Mount that Matthew records in Matthew 5-7. As we’ll see more next time, Luke connects the choosing of the twelve with this special sermon. The point is that Jesus had a really big day ahead of him. But beyond the special and memorable sermon, today I want us to especially appreciate how his all-night prayer was in the context of selecting these disciples.







In other words, before he made the big decision of which twelve to pick, he prays. He prays a lot. I’d imagine he prayed about who to choose. That was probably a lot of what he prayed for. But when you have all night to pray, you can cover a lot of ground. So, I would imagine after a concentrated time of praying for whom to pick, he then probably made he decision on whom he was going to pick. And then he probably prayed for each of them. Surely, Jesus prayed over each person whom he would select to be among the twelve.







Let us take some application in this first point. Jesus shows us the grace of prayer. And he shows us that especially before a big decision, it is proper and good to spend some concentrated time in prayer. This was literally one of the most important decisions Jesus made during his earthly ministry. In a certain sense, it was one of the most far-reaching decisions. And so, he prayed long and fervently all through the night before making this decision. Let us take application here. Do we pray like this before big decisions or before big days that are ahead of us? How many of us might go a lifetime without ever praying like this – but Jesus shows us a beautiful picture of prayer. You know, it is in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus teaches his disciples on the topic of how to pray. We see in Matthew 6:7 that the effectiveness of our prayers is not tied to the number of words we utter. He says that in critique of the pagans who would fill their praises with empty phrases or vain repetitions. Yet, while that is absolutely true, and Jesus even gives them a rather short prayer as a model of how to pray – I speak of the Lord’s Prayer, he nonetheless also models the commendableness of long,

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