Sermon Tone Analysis

Many of you know that — by the grace of God — I will be receiving my Master’s Degree from Dallas Theological Seminary in May.

This has been an amazing journey and one that frankly proves in my mind that God still does miraculous things.

He took a college dropout and enabled him to be educated at one of the top seminaries in the nation, learning under some of the most well-respected biblical scholars in the world.

From the beginning of this journey, I have said it would be to God’s glory and not for mine.

It was only by His grace that I ever got into the program that I’ll graduate from.

And it has only been by His grace that I have been able to juggle the things I have had to juggle in order to get the work done.

Now, as I prepared to begin my studies at DTS, I needed to find a degree program that would equip me to do ministry, while allowing me to work a full schedule.

And I found the Master of Arts in Christian Leadership, which is “only” a 65-credit program and could be completed with a minimal number of visits to DTS campuses.

As you would expect, there is a significant focus on leadership in the courses that are required for the Master of Arts in Christian Leadership.

What you might not expect, however, is the amount of time that Dallas Seminary requires its MACL graduates to have spent becoming followers.

There was a two-semester class called Spiritual Formation, which required weekly meetings with a spiritual accountability partner, along with multiple in-depth projects designed to help us grow in our relationship with Jesus and to uncover areas of our lives that needed work.

We had a single-semester class called Christian Life and Witness that was designed, among other things, to teach great humility to anyone who planned to go on from seminary and become a pastor.

One of my fellow students told me recently that he’d bumped into the professor for that class and mentioned how challenging it had been to dig so deep into the selves we tend to hide from ourselves, not to mention to keep up with the surprisingly grueling pace of the class.

The professor just laughed and laughed.

Apparently, he hears that kind of review from a new group of students at the end of every semester.

Dallas Seminary students must attend chapel services online or in person at least once a week, and there are a variety of cohort groups and mentorships that we are required to participate in throughout the seminary experience.

And the idea behind all of these experiences is that good leaders must first be good followers.

Actually, there’s something else to it, as well, and that’s a desire that — whatever else they become as a result of their time in seminary — DTS students will have become more like Jesus by the time they graduate.

That’s a process that we know as “discipleship,” and, while it can happen at seminary or within a family, or in some parachurch settings, discipleship is one of the primary purposes of the church.

Remember the Great Commission?

So, just before Jesus ascended in His risen and glorified body back into heaven, He gave His disciples their marching orders.

While you are going wherever you go, make disciples.

They were to be disciple-making disciples.

And the fact that He promised He would be with them always, “even to the end of the age,” tells us that this was a commandment from Jesus to more than just the 11 who stood with Him on that mountain in Galilee that day.

This was a commandment intended for all who would become Jesus’ disciples from that point onward.

So, then, it’s probably important for us to understand what it means to be a disciple.

In the most basic sense, the Greek word from which we get “disciple” means a student or pupil — one who learns from another.

The Gospels refer at times to the crowds who followed Jesus as disciples.

They were learning from Him.

At other times, the gospel writers and Jesus, Himself, refer to the 12 whom He had chosen as disciples.

And that’s especially helpful as we try to define discipleship that we look at these 12.

How did Jesus call them?

To Simon Peter and his brother, Jesus said, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

Right after that, He saw the brothers, James and John, in their fishing boat, and He called them.

And Matthew records that they immediately left the boat and their father and followed Him.

Later, Jesus passed by Matthew in the tax collector’s booth, and He turned to Matthew and said, “Follow Me.”

He found Phillip in Galilee and said to him, “Follow Me.”

After Peter’s restoration by the Sea of Galilee, when Jesus had asked him three times whether Peter loved Him, Jesus reiterated His command: “Follow Me.”

Now, there is an obvious sense in which these commands referred to the physical activity of going along with Jesus where He went.

This is how rabbis taught their students during this time in Judea.

Where the rabbi went, the students went.

They followed their teachers.

But there’s something more significant about Jesus’ command to His disciples.

There’s something greater going on with the command, “Follow Me.”

The idea was that not only were they to be listening to what He taught, but they were to be doing the things He did.

They were to be imitating Him to the best of their ability.

They were to be becoming more and more like Him.

And it’s the same for us today as the modern-day disciples of Jesus.

To be sure, we are to listen to what we’re taught about Him and to be learning about Him from others.

But the idea of discipleship always carried with it an expectation that the things that one learned would change that person.

In the Gospel accounts, discipleship — this process of becoming more and more like Jesus — “was accomplished by being physically with Christ, seeing what He did, hearing what He said, being corrected by Him, and following His example.”

[James G. Samra, “A Biblical View of Discipleship,” Bibliotheca Sacra 160 (2003): 222.]

The Apostle Mark made discipleship a significant theme of his Gospel, although he recorded very little in the way of Jesus’ direct teaching on the matter.

Mostly, he highlighted the fact that the 12 became disciples by following Jesus’ example.

But there is one significant passage in the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus talks about what it means to be His disciple.

You’ll find it in chapter 8, verses 34-38, though we’re just going to look at the first two verses of that passage.

Now, this exchange between Jesus and His followers takes place just after He had reprimanded Peter for rebuking Him because Jesus had said He would be rejected by the Jewish religious leaders and that He would be killed and rise again after three days.

And the context here is especially significant, because Jesus was about to tell His disciples that they must be willing to give up their own lives in order to follow HIm.

Let’s look at verses 34 and 35.

If anyone wishes to come after Jesus — if anyone wishes to follow Him — he must deny himself.

He must be willing to turn his back on his own wishes, his own dreams, his own desires.

And he must take up his cross and follow Jesus.

Through the years, there’s been a lot of bad theology connected to this idea of taking up our own crosses.

You’ve probably heard someone refer to some hardship in their life and say, “Well, it’s just my cross to bear.”

And maybe you’ve seen stories about guys who walk across the continent, carrying a cross, as if Jesus was making a literal command here for His followers.

Taking up your cross doesn’t have anything to do with either of these things.

When the Romans made those who were being taken to their execution carry their own crosses, it was to show that they were under the forced submission to the Roman government.

Jesus here is saying his followers should voluntarily submit themselves to Him.

We must deny ourselves as our own authority.

We must surrender ourselves to His authority.

And we can get a glimpse of this meaning by looking at verse 35.

Here, Jesus says that anyone who tries to maintain control of his or her own life will lose something more valuable in the future.

For the unsaved, they’ll lose salvation.

For the saved, they’ll lose rewards in heaven.

On the other hand, anyone who gives Him control of their lives by faithfully following God’s will for them will gain something infinitely greater.

For the unsaved, that is salvation.

For the saved, that’s rewards in heaven.

And so, we see in these two verses the essence of what it means to be a disciple.

It means surrendering oneself to God in Christ Jesus.

First, by placing your faith in Jesus as the Son of God and the one whose sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection enable sinners to be saved.

And second, by placing your life in His hands and allowing the Holy Spirit to make you ever more into the likeness of Christ.

So, drawing on our previous teaching about baptism as the first act of obedience for a new believer, we come to what I think is a good working definition of a disciple.

A disciple is a baptized believer in Jesus who is following the commandments of Jesus.

And what I’m going to suggest to you this morning is that discipleship — the making and growing of disciples — is something that happens best in the context of the corporate church.

Turn to Ephesians, chapter 4.

This is a wonderful letter about how it should look to be a church bound by unity and love in the Holy Spirit.

And in this passage, Paul describes some of the spiritual gifts that are given by the Spirit to empower that bond.

Let’s pick up in verse 11.

Now, I’m not going to spend a lot of time going through this passage verse by verse.

Today, I want to draw your attention to the purpose for the gift of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers.

Do you see it there in verse 12?

They’re given in order to equip the saints — the ones who have been saved, in other words, the church — for service.

And they’re given for building up the body of Christ — again, the Church.

The idea here is that the disciplers —and here, that’s the apostles and prophets and evangelists and pastors and teachers — the disciplers are here to help the saints become mature in Christ.

No longer children tossed about by every crazy doctrine or by slick teachers on the television late at night or by prosperity preachers wearing flashy clothes and preaching in vast auditoriums.

But look at verse 16.

You see, it isn’t just preachers and teachers and the rest of the people Paul names in verse 11 who have this responsibility of discipling others.

Every joint, and each individual part of the body of Christ has some role to play in growing this body that is being built up in love.

Last week, I told you that worshiping God is the purpose of the church.

And what I am telling you this week is no contradiction.