Poised for More! (Discipleship)

The Nail Isn’t the Problem

This week I took Noelle’s car to get a couple of new tires. One of the tires had a nail in it. I figured I would replace the one old one and simply get the nail pulled out of the other and sealed up. When the guy at the tire place took off the tire with the nail in it, he pointed out to me that the tire’s steel belts were showing through the tire. I had a choice to make. Take the nail and plug the hole of the tire and send Noelle on her way to Austin tomorrow with a fixed old tire and one new one, or replace both tires.

All of us hear that story, and we immediately think that the decision is a no-brainer. Of course, it would be foolish to fix the flat of a bad tire. You’re simply asking for more trouble down the road. In fact, it could be dangerous. It already is dangerous; the belts are showing. So yes, we get a new tire and get rid of not just the nail, but the entire tire. For a $5 fee of course… I have to pay for them to dump my tire! We’ve all been in these kinds of situations in which fixing what seems to be the most obvious problem isn’t the answer. That the real fix is in fixing the deeper and more serious problem.

Our topic today is one in which I tend to think we are fixing holes in bad tires. Discipleship is a buzzword. In fact, our mother church St. Paul is spending some time next weekend with Pastor Justin Rossow who has written extensively on Discipleship. It’s an important topic. But most of the time, what we do for discipleship isn’t really fixing much. It may help in the short term, but we never really get to the heart of the problem.

The most basic definition of discipleship is this:

Discipleship is following Jesus.

What did Jesus teach? What does Jesus expect from us? We answer these questions all over the map. The problem isn’t defining discipleship as following Jesus. The problem is describing what it means to follow Jesus. More often than not, when we start talking about discipleship, we’re simply pulling the nail out of the tire and plugging a hole, rather than resolving the bigger issue.

And here’s why: pick up any book on Amazon having to do with discipleship and 95% of them, regardless of how discipleship is defined, are dealing with behavior. You’ll find dozens of tips on how to have a better prayer life, how to have a better Bible-reading plan, how to engage in community, and how to serve each other, even how to meditate on the Bible. All of those are well and good and we will talk about some of these things. But the dirty little secret is that none of those things, in and of themselves, will make us more like Jesus.

We can’t DO anything to be more like Jesus.

That’s a shocking statement. We can’t do. The best we can do on any given day is a dirty rag, according to the Bible. Trying to be like Jesus is all law and no gospel and only the gospel can change our lives. What we need is not for us to do something, but we need Jesus to do something. Before we say anything about prayer, or Bible-reading, or joining Jesus in His mission, and all those other things that we do in following Jesus, we have to have Jesus do something. And he has.

The verse we all run to in beginning the discussion about discipleship is this:

Matthew 28:19-20 “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you.”

Go and make disciples. And how do you do this? According to this passage, disciples are made in two things:

baptizing them

teaching them

Baptizing and teaching them. And when it comes to discipleship, or what we say is following Jesus, we hone in on teaching them. Making them more educated. Giving them more knowledge. Making sure they know how to act like Christians. After all, it says “teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you.” And so we end up with millions of dollars being spent on how to behave like a Christian. That becomes the paradigm for discipleship because this verse says this is how disciples are made.

But the problem is, we’ve missed not simply the critical ingredient. We’ve missed the most fundamental piece of it all. What’s the first thing Jesus says here about making disciples? Baptizing them. Baptizing them. Discipleship starts with Jesus. Disciples are made by Jesus. Discipleship starts with the gospel. The gospel creates disciples.

Discipleship is not your work or my work.

Baptism is what makes a disciple. It’s what starts the whole thing. And baptism isn’t our work, it’s not something we do. It is something done to us. Baptism is God giving us His name… baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We get a new name in baptism. We get a new identity in baptism. We become disciples in baptism. And if we don’t start with the idea that Jesus is the one who is making disciples, then whatever we are teaching in making disciples is already off the rails.

This understanding of discipleship, that it begins with what Jesus is doing to us, is found in our passage with Paul the great missionary. We spent some time a few weeks ago in this part of Paul’s letter to the church in the ancient city of Ephesus. Paul says Jesus has given gifts to the church for the equipping and building up of the church. This is Paul’s way of talking about discipleship or what it means to follow Jesus.

There are two ways that Paul describes discipleship:

Ephesians 4:13 “Growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness.”

Growing into maturity. Jesus gives the gifts of teachers and preachers and others in leadership so that the church body would be equipped to grow into maturity.

Discipleship is growth into maturity

Whatever we say about discipleship and the activities of discipleship, all of it is designed to grow us in maturity in our following Jesus. That raises the question… what does Paul mean by maturity. More than once, throughout this letter Paul references “love”. We often load maturity with all sorts of pre-conceived notions of what maturity means, many of them going far beyond what the Bible says. But it all begins with love. Paul says live lives of love as Jesus also loved us and gave himself for us. That’s Paul’s maturity.

But maturity is not about us trying to do all the things that we think will grow us into maturity. Maturity does involve wisdom, but that wisdom isn’t manufactured by us. Paul says it right here.

Ephesians 4:13 “Growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness.”

There’s a running theme throughout all of this. Jesus is filling every corner of society with himself. Jesus gives gifts to grow us. Jesus makes us mature. Jesus is the One growing us. Measured by Christ’s fullness means that Jesus is filling us up with himself to the fullest measure. Paul already said in this letter that Jesus was filling the church with himself so that the world would be full of Jesus. Now, he’s saying it again about each of us. Jesus is growing us to be more like Him by filling us up with himself. And how does he do that? That answer lies in the next piece about discipleship here.

Paul says then that our Christian leadership, those gifts that Christ has given to His church equipping the church to

Ephesians 4:15 “Grow in every way into him who is the head—Christ.”

that’s a fancy way of saying,

Discipleship is growth into Jesus through Word and Sacrament.

And we grow into Jesus as we speak God’s Word in love. There’s that word love again. Jesus uses His Word to grow us into himself. Discipleship is about becoming more like Jesus, but it’s not about us trying harder to be like Jesus. the more we try, the more arrogant we become, and the more frustrated we become. We become more like Jesus when we allow Jesus to use His Word to make us more like himself. We become more like Jesus when we depend on Jesus to fill us with Himself as the Word is preached, as the Word is taught, as the Sacrament is received in love.

Discipleship is dependence on Jesus.

This is all His doing. Discipleship is Jesus working in us and through us by His Spirit and by His Word, the Bible. This must be the most forgotten aspect of what it means to do what Jesus commands. Over and over and over again in the gospels, Jesus is saying “Trust me.” “Put your faith in me.” “Believe me”. “Depend on me.” At one point in his ministry, when he was having a conversation about these things, the crowd was telling Jesus give us something to do. As if “doing” would somehow earn brownie points with God. And Jesus says, doing the will of my Father means believing in me. That’s it. That’s not just for when you first become a Christian. That’s for every day of your Christian life. Discipleship begins with Jesus making you His disciple and discipleship continues as we pursue Jesus and depend on Jesus for everything. Jesus plus nothing equals everything.

Discipleship is engaging in Jesus work in my life.

As Jesus works in our lives. and as we depend on him, we engage with him. And now we begin talking about all those things that we build into our lives as habits of the Christian life. So yes, we involve ourselves in prayer, not because we are earning brownie points with God or our activity makes us pleasing to God. No, we involve ourselves in prayer because this is how Jesus is doing His work in us. We read our Bibles and study the Bible and figure out how to better understand the Bible, not because it somehow will make us morally righteous. It will never do that. No, we study, we read, we understand because this is how Jesus changes our hearts and our minds and our lives. The gospel is where our lives are being transformed by Jesus through His Spirit, not through better standards of living. Jesus is constantly engaging us as we engage in these spiritual disciplines.

Which leads to this… If this is discipleship, then maybe the best question to ask as we think about what we are to be doing in following Jesus is this:

What is Jesus up to in your life?

Where you work, where you live, where you learn, and where you play? What does it look like Jesus is doing? What is he teaching you? How is he growing you? As he grows you through His Word in love, what do you see happening the various areas of your life?

Justin Rossow has one of the best definitions of discipleship I’ve seen. Here’s what he says:

Discipleship is the adventure of loving and being loved.

We are loved by Jesus in order to love others. That’s discipleship. In fact, you can hear our mission statement in that definition of discipleship.

We are loved by Jesus for the love of Los Fresnos.

All of us are poised for more Jesus in discipleship. We’ve all been made disciples. Jesus is making us disciples and equipping us to make more disciples so that we can fill every area of our life with more Jesus. Where we live, work, learn, and play. Yes, we engage in the activities that are part of our spiritual growth, such as prayer and building community and serving our neighbor, but we do so being completely dependent on Jesus.

The bigger problem with the tire was the steel belts. The bigger problem of our lives is that we are sinners. We never pray as we should. We never read our Bibles like we should. We can’t manufacture obedience to Jesus. We can’t live good enough lives in order to be more mature in Jesus. Jesus says, get off the performance wheel. Place your faith in Him. Jesus is enough for our Christian lives. And Jesus is at work, molding you and shaping you and giving you the salvation and forgiveness you need to serve your family, your neighbors, your friends. As we pray, as we put our faith into practice, Jesus is already at work in us and among us. By his grace we are Poised for more Jesus in every area of our lives.

Let’s Pray.

At the core of all discipleship is Christ’s word. Here we speak Christ’s word in love. We follow Jesus by receiving Him in His Word and at His Table.