The Experience of Being a Disciple | Rev. Malcolm G. Smith

There are lots of good things about following the Lord, but there are hard things too. The Lord’s disciples were often confused and scared; they were often rebuked and challenged by the Lord; and they often didn’t understand what was going on or what the Lord was saying. And yet they kept following Him. This Sunday, as we approach Easter, we will think about what we should expect in our efforts to be the Lord’s disciple.

Readings: Psalm 19; Matthew 16:13-17, 20-28; Arcana Coelestia 3857 

Minister: Rev. Malcolm G. Smith 

Delivered March 22nd, 2026 at the Bryn Athyn Cathedral in Bryn Athyn, PA.

The Bryn Athyn Church is a congregation of the General Church of the New Jerusalem, located in Bryn Athyn, PA. We are committed to helping each other draw closer to the Lord God Jesus Christ through lives of love and useful service, guided by the Old and New Testaments and the Heavenly Doctrine for the New Church (contained in the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg). Please join us for worship on Sunday mornings; services and times can be found at brynathynchurch.org.

Transcript

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Good morning and welcome to our family service. Today we're talking about being the Lord's disciple, and part of that is being changed by what the Lord teaches. So we'll begin with a reading from Psalm nineteen. The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul. The testimony of Jehovah is faithful, making wise the simple. The precepts of Jehovah are upright, making glad the heart. The commandment of Jehovah is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of Jehovah is clean, standing forever. The judgments of Jehovah are truth, they are just altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, and then much fine gold, and sweeter than honey in the dropping of honeycombs. Also by them is your servant warned. In keeping them there is much reward. Amen. Reading further from the Gospel of Matthew, it's a story of the Lord interacting with his disciples, where they get some things right and some things wrong. And Jesus, coming into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, asked his disciples, saying, Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am? And they said, Some say John the Baptist, and some Elijah, and others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. He says to them, But who do you say that I am? And Simon Peter answering said, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answering said to him, You are blessed, Simon Barjonah, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who was in the heavens. Then he charged his disciples that they should say to no one that he was Jesus the Christ. From then on Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day. And Peter, taking him aside, began to rebuke him, saying, Mercy, Lord, this shall not happen to you. But turning, he said to Peter, Get behind me, Satan, you are an offense to me, because you are not wise in the things of God, but the things of men. Amen. And our final lesson is taken from the teachings for the new church, the book Arcana Celestia. The disciples themselves, who spent all their time with the Lord and heard so much about his kingdom, were not yet able to perceive inner truth. The only view of the Lord they could form was that he would raise up the Jewish people to a position of power and glory over all the nations in the entire world. After listening to all the Lord said about his heavenly kingdom, they could not help thinking that the heavenly kingdom would resemble an earthly one. So, after the Lord taught them what it was to be greatest in heaven, he still spoke in terms they could grasp, saying that they would sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel. If the disciples had been told how things really were, they would have spurned the news and each gone back to his own business, leaving the Lord behind. He spoke this way, so that they would accept it and be introduced by it to inner truth. Hidden within the external truths the Lord spoke lay internal truths, which come out in the open with time. And once they come out, the external truths disappear, serving only as a stimulus or means for thought about internal truths. Amen. Here end our readings from the Lord's Word. Blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it. Amen. If you look up at that window, you can see the Lord and his twelve disciples. And today we're going to talk about what it would be like to be one of his disciples? What is it like to be a person who's trying to follow and learn from the Lord? And we probably all have some good ideas about this, and some ideas that are a little bit wrong, a little bit inaccurate. And so, to get a sense of what it's really like, we're going to look at two stories of the Lord working with his disciples and see what we can learn from those about what it might be like for us to follow the Lord. So let's jump right into our story. The first one from our lessons. In this story, the Lord does something that all good teachers do. He asks questions. He asks his disciples, Who do people think that I am? And they give various answers. And then he puts them on the spot and says, Yes, but who do you say that I am? And Peter gets it right. He says, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Peter and the other disciples had been following the Lord for some time, and they had had unique opportunities to see him do amazing things and hear him teach mind-blowing things. And actually, a few chapters earlier than the story we read, the Lord points out what an amazing opportunity they were having. He says to them, But blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear. For Amen I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it. And in our story, the Lord Peter gives his good answer, and the Lord says to him, You are blessed, Simon Barjonh, but because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in the heavens. And this is part of what we would hope we would get from following the Lord, from being his disciples. Experiences of being blessed, of understanding things with the Lord's help, of having things revealed to us from heaven, hearing things, seeing things, understanding things that we wouldn't otherwise, because we are spending time with the Lord. And that does happen when we come to church sometimes, when we read the word on our own, and especially when we try to live according to what the Lord teaches, we do see different things, hear different things, understand different things than we would if we were just trying to figure stuff out from our own brains or from what we can learn from the world. However, to be a disciple of the Lord is not just one experience of being blessed and enlightened after another experience being blessed and enlightened. There's also another side to this. And this is shown to us perfectly and painfully by Peter moments later in the same story. Peter had just said that Jesus was the Christ or the Messiah. And there are prophecies in the Lord's word about the Messiah. Some of them sound great, victorious, but other ones say that bad things are going to happen to the Messiah. He'll be wounded, bruised, oppressed, and afflicted. And so the Lord tried to explain this to his disciples that this was going to happen to him as the Messiah. It says, from then on, Jesus began to show to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day. But Peter wasn't buying it. In his mind, Jesus was getting this all wrong. So Peter took Jesus aside and rebuked him, told him he was doing it wrong, and said, This is not going to happen. Now, when Peter does this, it's easy to see how ridiculous it is. Who did he think he was? Why did he think that it was his place to tell the Messiah what was going to happen? But when we read the word, some thoughts, like Peter's thoughts here, might occur to us. We might think, why is the Lord talking this way? Why did he say it that way? Why could he have not been more clear about this thing or that thing? Surely it would have been better if the Lord had said this or done that or not done this or not said that. All those thoughts that might occur to us are like Peter rebuking the Lord and taking him aside to tell him, that's not what's going to happen, Lord. It's just as ridiculous for us to have those thoughts in all our wisdom as it is for Peter. So because it was wrong for Peter to say those things to the Lord and rebuke him, the Lord corrected his disciple. He said, Get behind me, Satan, you are an offense to me, because you are not wise in the things of God, but the things of men. Ouch. Imagine being called Satan by the Lord. But the reality was there was something satanic in Peter, like there is in all of us. The term Satan means enemy or adversary or opponent, one who's going against you in something. And the thing in Peter that was wanting to tell the Lord he was wrong was opposing the Lord, was satanic. And we all have something in us that is an enemy to the Lord, that is opposed to what the Lord wants. The Lord said to Peter, You are not wise in the things of God, but the things of men. And this is true of us too. There's part of us that's only smart and good at figuring out how to get what we want for ourselves. It's not wise about things of God. In fact, it would rather use the things of God to get what we want for ourselves. And so the Lord corrects that in us, tells us when that is satanic. And so the Lord will keep doing this with his disciples and with us. Keep calling out that worldly, earthly, satanic part of us, and keep encouraging us to lift our minds above to higher things, to heavenly things. And the Lord knows that some of the stuff he'll say to his disciples, they'll understand only sort of right now, but more later on. One time he said, What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will know after this. He knew they could understand more later on. Just like it said in our teachon from the teachings for the new church, the disciples themselves, who spent all their time with the Lord and heard so much about his kingdom, were not yet able to perceive inner truth. Hidden within the external truths the Lord spoke lay internal truths, which come out in the open with time. As people trying to be the Lord's disciples, we need to hold on to this idea that we will understand better with time, if we're willing to stick with the Lord and keep following him. And this brings us to our second story of the Lord teaching his disciples. And this time the thing he was teaching them was rather confusing. Here's what he said. Then Jesus said to them, Amen, Amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him again at the last day. For my flesh is truly food, and my blood is truly drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Not surprisingly, many of his disciples were confused by this. It says, Therefore many of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This word is hard. Who can hear it? And the Lord knew they were confused, and so he explained some more, and said, It is the spirit that makes alive, the flesh profits nothing. The sayings which I speak to you are spirit, and they are life. He was explaining to them, he was not talking just in a literal way, but in a spiritual way, a symbolic way, a correspondential way. But still many of his disciples didn't like it and stopped following him. It says, From this time many of his disciples went away into things behind and walked no more with him. These people couldn't raise their minds to where the Lord was trying to reach them, and so they were not willing to be his disciples anymore. And so the Lord turns to his twelve disciples and said, Do you also want to go away? And it seems very unlikely, by the way, that they had a better understanding of what the Lord was talking about. Maybe, maybe they had more of a sense of it, but they might have been equally confused by what the Lord meant by this: eating his flesh and drinking his blood. And even we today, with the help of the teachings for the new church, might still be a little bit uncomfortable with the Lord talking in that way. We might have those Peter thoughts saying, Lord, could you just have been a little bit more clear what you were talking about? But the twelve disciples, with again Peter as their spokesperson, even though they likely didn't fully understand, said this to the Lord Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the sayings of eternal life. And we have come to believe and know that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Over time they had come to believe and know who the Lord was. And because of who they believed he was, they didn't need to fully understand at that moment. They knew that he was the one teaching them the things of eternal life. And maybe they trusted that eventually they'd understand what he was talking about. And we need a similar trust and humility to be the Lord's disciples. It's hard to be humbled. It's hard to be corrected and told that we've got something wrong. It's hard to trust in the Lord. And all of these things get easier with practice. And we can see how this works more broadly if we just think about school or playing a sport or anything where we're trying to get better at something. The disciples and students and players who learn the most from their teachers and coaches are the ones who are willing to be regularly humbled, regularly corrected, regularly told, try it again like this. Because they trust that their coaches or teachers have their good in mind and are leading them in a good direction. So let's try to get good at being humbled by the Lord, get good at being corrected by the Lord, and trust that He'll show us a better way. So, what's it like to be the Lord's disciples? Sometimes it's to be blessed with enlightenment from heaven. Sometimes it's to be blessed by being told how wrong and satanic your thinking is. Sometimes it's going to be being confused. And sometimes it's needing to trust that you'll understand better later on, and in the meanwhile, to keep following the one who has the sayings of eternal life. Amen.