Discipleship
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Introduction
Introduction
This week and next week we are going to dive into our last two topics in our journey through the Gospel and the life of Jesus.
This week we are talking about discipleship
Next week we are talking about lordship. Lordship is where we began this series, and lordship is where we will end this series.
The Gospel is translated as “good news”
That is what it means. But as we approach today’s topic, I want to separate the language of “good news” from “easy news” or even “fun news”.
I want you to imagine that I fell off of a ladder and broke my leg. And I want you to imagine that it is a nasty break, where my bone is sticking through my skin and there is blood everywhere.
Let’s say we call the paramedics (please do!) and they take a look at me and say, “We need to reset this bone”
For them to reset the bone, it will be painful. But they need to do that. It is the right thing to do. We may even say that it is good to do this so that I can again heal properly.
This is the snapshot of sin I want us to carry.
The Gospel is not for good people.
The Gospel is for people who know they are sinful and broken.
The Gospel calls for lordship. We will talk about this next week.
But setting aside the direction and purpose of my life, is good.
It may not sound good. I don’t get to do what I want, when I want, and how I want.
I try to do what is good for me all the time.
But lordship says, “You don’t, and it is good for you to let it go.”
Good news may be painful. It may be difficult, but it is not only good, but best.
As we have looked at the topic of the Gospel, we have tackled the idea of Gospel.
Looking at the reality of our sin and separation from God. Coming to this humbling reality…is good.
Understanding that our choices in life were wrong and often sinful…is good.
So today, we are going to tackle the Good News and how discipleship fits with that idea.
I am going to open up with the word “disciple” or “discipleship” and we are going to break this down.
Going all the way back into the OT times (before Jesus) there was a process of teaching the law in Israel
Rabbi and disciples
The disciples would follow the rabbi, listen to the rabbi and one day they too would become a rabbi.
There was a phrase that said, “May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi.” implying that you would be walking so close, learning so perfectly from the rabbi that the dust coming off of his shoes would cover your body.
When Jesus began His ministry, one of the first things he did was call some guys to be His disciples.
Matthew 4 tells about this story
There were guys who were sitting by the lake mending their nets with their family. Jesus called to them and said...
“Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”
When Jesus called them to be His disciples, he laid the entire path out in front of them in one sentence.
They would have to leave their families, their nets and their professions and follow Him.
They would be changed in the process as Jesus would take them from being fishermen of fish to becoming fishers of people.
They would have to leave their life
They would have to change
The would have to live that change out
After Jesus’ ministry, when He was crucified and resurrected from the dead, He identified an important transition in this process for His disciples.
They had left their nets
They had changed
Now He would send them out to fish for people.
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
In condensed form, Jesus said, “What I did with you, now you go do with others, and teach them to do the same.”
From this we have the word “discipleship”
It is a word that describes the process of being a disciple of Jesus, growing as His follower, and going out to make other disciples of Jesus.
Perspectives of Discipleship
You may be here today and as I say the words “disciple” or “discipleship” it may sound foreign to you.
You may be here and think, “I am a Christian. I come to church. I have done the things I need to do or that someone told me I need to do to become a Christian.” “I don’t know what a disciple is”
You may be here and you have been in other churches where ‘discipleship’ is a 4-6 week course that you take and once you take that course, you are good to go.
You may have grown up in a church like I did where being a Christian was the emphasis and discipleship was a sort of extra credit.
Say the prayer, get dunked, and try to get other people to say a prayer and get dunked.
Discipleship was for the pastoral staff and the higher ups that seemed to know all of the answers.
Discipleship seemed like a million miles away.
Today, I want to bring some clarity to this word and the importance of it.
Discipleship
Jesus did not have a single Christian following him.
If we look at Christianity as a world religion, it didn’t exist during the life of Jesus.
Jesus was walking around doing ministry and he had 12 disciples.
No one was converting. They either became a follower of Jesus (a disciple) or they rejected him
We can see a snapshot of that from a story we told a while back about a blind man who was healed by Jesus.
The religious leaders were interrogating him and finally he said...
He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?”
He didn’t say, “Do you want to be a Christian too?” He didn’t say, “Do you want to join His religion?”
There were only two options. Be a disciple or reject Jesus.
This is why Jesus only called disciples. That is why He sent His disciples to go make disciples.
The word “Christian” comes much later in the early church
Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul,
and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.
To be called a Christian meant you were a disciple.
Somewhere in the pages of history, these two words became separated. They formed different meanings.
But we are not here to study church History, we are here to study Jesus.
Jesus wants disciples. If you are not a disciple of Jesus, then you have missed the whole point of what Jesus asks
He does not ask for behavior modification to follow Him
He asks for something far more personal. Relationship. Transformative relationship.
The Call to Discipleship
We have the tendency to look at verses like the Great Commission and say, “Piece of cake, all we need to do is go make disciples”
And we begin creating strategies for going around and making disciples.
We talk about the importance of relationship in making disciples- and it IS important
We talk about the importance of teaching God’s Word in making disciples- and it IS important.
But there is a step that comes before these things that I want to talk about today.
Today is a very hard sermon. But I believe it is entirely necessary. If we don’t speak the entire truth about these topics, we misunderstand and/or mislead others into a discipleship that looks nothing like what Jesus created.
Key Passages
“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?
For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you,
saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
“Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand?
If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.
In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.
“Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?
“Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.
PRAY
PRAY
Those can be some very heavy verses
So you know, you can go read the contexts of those two verses and they parallel each other in ideas and the cost of discipleship.
Now as we look at these verses, our initial reaction is to soften the blow of those verses.
These verses make us feel uncomfortable. We don’t like them. We want them to be gentler.
But Jesus did not give them to us gently. He gave them to us like this.
Can you imagine being in the crowd when Jesus said this?
It is probably like being in the crowd today when I read this. Maybe some of the people who were there were waiting for Jesus to crack a smile and reveal that this was a joke.
But He didn’t
We all have the temptation here to soften this.
This is a very dangerous temptation
We must be aware of the temptation to take something Jesus says that we either don’t like or don’t understand and ignore it or twist it to say something we are comfortable with.
People have done this for centuries and have undercut the authority of Scripture in doing so.
In order to wrap our heads around what Jesus is saying here, we need to step back and look at what He has presented in His Word
The Gospel
God created mankind to be in perfect relationship with Him. This is the story of origins of our existence.
We can then see that sin entered the world and broke relationship with God and man, as well as man to man.
Now before we go too much further, we can look at the destination of what God desires at this point.
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.
‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
Sin entered the world and separated God from mankind.
We can see that the result of God’s work in History drives to a point of restored knowledge and relationship with God.
So we must look at the rest of this book as God’s process of bringing mankind to a place of restored relationship, exactly how He created us to be.
In the OT we see the sacrificial system put into place
This system was put into place so the barriers of sin the prevented relationship with God could be removed so mankind could know God.
This was temporary and used sinful people to act as priests between God and man
God ultimately sent His Son to be the perfect sacrifice and the priest between God and man, once for all.
To be in relationship with God means two things:
First, we recognize our sin and we reach out to Him as savior
Jesus sacrifice on the cross in our place opens the door to relationship with God
Second, we don’t simply have a friendship with God.
We must recognize that we are not equal partners with God.
Even in the Garden of Eden and at the end of the story, God is God and we are not.
A relationship with God means that we recognize His Lordship and our surrender to Him as Lord.
If there is no understanding of Lordship, there is no relationship.
At this point, many people take the religious approach to following Jesus.
At this point, I am saved. Then I exist as saved until He calls me home.
Diagram
This is not the discipleship approach to the Gospel
The discipleship approach means that in faith, receive the reward of righteousness through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and we entrust our lives to Him and surrender to Him as Lord.
We then don’t sit there as “saved”
Rather, we have the door opened. Jesus has torn the curtain of sin that separated us from Him
We now actively pursue the knowledge of God as we seek to follow Jesus every day.
This is all relational language
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
In return, Jesus asks of us to
Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
This is the first and greatest commandment.
And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
He doesn’t say, “Do loving things” He asks for our very hearts.
Now I want to get back to our passage for today.
“Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
When God asks us to Love the Lord our God with all of our hearts...
What do you think that means?
He doesn’t say, Love the Lord your God with most of your heart. A lot of your heart. Or with a sincerity of heart.
He says, “All of your heart.”
This is more than you love your father, or mother, or children, or spouse.
Jesus is our Lord. He is the primary relationship in our lives
Jesus doesn’t just take the top spot on the priority list. He becomes our priority list.
I want to break down how this looks in a practical sense.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that I love my wife. It’s probably something that we need to do as husbands.
But then, let’s say that I consider becoming a disciple of Jesus. I look at this verse.
My love for Jesus needs to be superior to every other love in my life.
In fact, it goes so far as to say that I must reject my love of these things and trust Him in this.
Now this is not a call for Christians to abandon their families.
It is not a call for Christians to neglect their families or act in hostility.
The second command that Jesus gave was to love your neighbor as yourself
The Bible also says for husbands to love their wives.
What does loving my wife look like without Jesus?
It is a feeling
It is a give/get relationship
It is conditional
It is marred by sin and selfishness
What does it look like to love my wife as a disciple of Jesus?
He loves my wife through me
He empowers me to love
It is a sacrificial choice (not excluded from feelings, but not dependent on feelings)
It is unconditional
If it is a love from Christ, it is not built upon the foundation of performance by the other person.
It is built on the reality that this person is a creation of God
It is pure and holy
It points her to her primary relationship, Jesus, not me.
She will love me like Jesus loves me as well.
This will change a marriage. We like to think in rainbows and butterflies thinking that this will be all happy and good.
This is not always the case. Your marriage may have been built on a human love.
Changing it to a response to the knowledge of Jesus changes your approach to each other
Your spouse may not want to draw closer to Jesus. Will this cause conflict?
It may.
If you love her toward Christ and she rejects that, your marriage will struggle.
How do you want your daughter to be loved?
By a person who loves Jesus first, then loves your daughter with the love of Jesus.
I think we all agree that this is the case.
Jesus said we must love Him more than we love the closest relationships of our lives.
Our priorities change from “Love my wife, love my kids...”
To, love Jesus. Love my wife as Jesus empowers me. Love my kids as Jesus directs me.
Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
Jesus moves on from Himself being the primary love relationship in our lives.
We look at this and see that Jesus said, “We must take up our cross”
We look at this through the lens of Jesus being crucified..
But Jesus wouldn’t be crucified until Matthew 27. This is Matthew 10.
The cross didn’t carry with it any meaningful symbolism of sin and resurrection.
The cross was merely a tool of death.
Jesus says, you must put yourself, you will, your love, and your vision to death and follow me.
If you argue with that point, look at the next verse where he says this very thing.
Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.
If we seek after our life in our own ways, we will not find the life we were created to have.
However, if we choose to lay down our lives and become a true disciple of Jesus, we will truly find life.
The Tower
Becoming a disciple of Jesus is not a minor modification to our habits. It is an overhaul of our lives.
We must consider this before we ever follow Jesus.
“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?
For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you,
saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
I love this quote from John Stott:
“The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict, half-built towers – the ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish.
For thousands of people still ignore Christ’s warning and undertake to follow him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so-called ‘nominal Christianity’.
In countries to which Christian civilization has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent, but thin, veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved; enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable.
Their religion is a great, soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life, while changing its place and shape to suit the convenience. no wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism.”—John Stott (Basic Christianity)
Conclusion
The cost of discipleship is a high cost indeed
It requires adjustment of every aspect of our lives.
Surely we will fail.
Peter failed. He denied even knowing Jesus, while claiming to be a disciple who lived to know Jesus.
But, praise God for His grace. It is not an excuse for sin, but it is a revelation of the heart of God who created us and draws us to Himself.
This teaching in Luke 14 is a very hard teaching. The cost is high.
But it is followed up in Luke 15 by a beautiful revelation of the heart of God.
Shepherd loses one sheep
Woman loses one coin
A Father loses a son.