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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.
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