Reproduction - Orientation — Dale Rhoton

Reproduction as a Biblical Theme

...on reproduction. Reproduction. The theme of reproduction is found throughout the entire Word of God. We find it in many places and many of the books, beginning from early cases in the Old Testament, like Moses, as far on as the Apostle Paul in the New Testament.

This theme is one of the most interesting and often one of the most neglected themes in the Bible. Let us look again at the Great Commission. So often we've looked at the Great Commission and have gotten a challenge for the foreign mission field.

But I'd like for us to look at the Great Commission and these moments as not only a challenge for the regions beyond, but as a challenge for wherever we are to reproduce for Jesus Christ. I will read from the Berkeley translation of the Gospel of Matthew, the 28th chapter in the 19th verse and the 20th.

"...go out, therefore, 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 observe everything that I have enjoined upon you.

And mind you, I am alongside you all the days until the end of the age.". In the Great Commission, we see basically two main goals. First of all, we see the goal of worldwide evangelization, to go into all the world and preach the gospel, which is more succinctly spoken in the Gospel of Mark.

Then the second major goal is to make disciples. One goal, evangelism. The other goal, making disciples. Actually, both of these are reproducing. Because when you speak to someone about Jesus Christ, even if you do not win him to Christ, you're reproducing some of your thoughts and some of your ideas into this individual.

Also, reproduction can be seen in evangelism in this sense. The very purpose of evangelism, the very desire of evangelism, is to reproduce. None of us go out and try to evangelize someone without wanting, deep down in our hearts, to see this person come to Jesus Christ.

And when that person does come to Jesus Christ, we reproduce. And so we see this thing of reproduction. And both goals of the Great Commission. But we want to think this evening mainly about the goal of reproducing disciples.

Jesus’ Pattern of Training a Few Disciples

Man-to-man vision. One person winning one and training one. This is the goal of each one of us that are in this work called Operation Mobilization, are in Semnalite, or Operation Islam, or Operation Communism.

Each one of us has a goal of seeing someone come to Jesus Christ and then of going on in the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the greatest life that ever lived. We see the greatest principles of reproduction that were ever executed.

In the life of Jesus Christ, we see a masterful display and in a powerful way this theme of reproduction. We all know, of course, that Jesus chose twelve men to whom he would just pour his very heart's being into.

Of course, know that only eleven of those really continued on for him. And yet just think what those eleven men did. All the value, the wisdom of the Lord Jesus Christ in finding out a great mass and hoping that some of his thoughts would rest in those minds.

But in the vision of finding just a few and training them and making sure that those men would really produce something. And this is the challenge on our hearts this evening. But more than those twelve, Jesus Christ took three men.

Now I'm not going to mention to you this evening who those three men were. But Jesus took three men and if you'll read through the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you will find it was when Jesus was alone with those three men.

Just think of that. The Lord Jesus in his mass ministry healing people, preaching the good news to people. But he always took time to be alone with the twelve. And then he wanted to give some real heart fervor to just three men in whom he saw great potential.

And those three men wrote a great part of the New Testament. Some of the most basic doctrines we can get from those three men as we read what they wrote. And so we see here a challenge in our lives. Maybe you're one of these people that is very zealous.

You like the whole street meetings. You like to do evangelistic work. You like to be in the great campaigns and see hundreds flocking forward to receive Jesus Christ. Of course this is a wonderful thrill.

This is something that each one of us should have on our hearts. And yet, how often we've not been able to conserve the fruits. So often we've been eager and just saying we want another soul to Christ rather than taking some of these that we want to Christ and really making sure that they're going on for the Lord.

The Lord Jesus Christ concentrated his effort. You know what I would like for you to do? Each one of you to read through the Synoptic Gospels. And note every time Jesus was along with these three men.

You find out who they are. And then notice what Jesus was trying to teach these men each time he was with them. Write that down on a sheet of paper and keep it with you. And every now and then it would be good to just examine your ministry and see if you're really following Christ.

Everyone wants to follow Christ. We want to walk in his steps. We want to do what he did in the way that he did it. Are you following Jesus Christ in this way? We can read about other great men in the Word of God who did this very same thing of just finding one or two others.

Discipling them, seeing them disciple others. Read the booklets of Born to Reproduce by Dawson Trotman and the booklet Christian Strategy. You will find many examples not only from the Word of God but also from modern experience of men, wonderful potential and the realization of this potential and discipling souls for the Master.

No doubt each one of you who are listening to this tape believe that this is what should be done. You've read the booklets Born to Reproduce and Christian Strategy. You've seen this taking place in others' lives and you've hungered for it.

You've thirsted for it. You say, well this is it. I see it. I see it in the Word of God. But how, how can I go about it? So let us just think, how can we go about finding a faithful heart and discipling them in Jesus Christ?

Prayer Before Choosing and Training Disciples

Would you please turn with me to Luke the 6th chapter, the 12th verse. Luke 6, 12. Let's see how Christ went about this. Isn't this the most logical thing to do? We who are following Him. Luke 6, 12. From the Berkeley Version.

In those days He, that is the Lord Jesus Christ, went off to the mountain to pray and was spending the entire night in communion with God. He spent the whole night with God. Isn't this an amazing thing?

Doesn't this verse just rebuke our prayer life? When we think of the blessed Son of God, who knew God just as well as God knows Himself because Jesus is God. And yet He wanted to be with. He went and He spent the whole evening in prayer.

It doesn't say that He planned on this. Maybe He just went and got lost in the love and in the fellowship and in the joy of being with His Father. And it just happened that He just tarried there and the next thing He knew it was morning.

We don't know, but we do know this, that the very next morning after He had spent that time in prayer, He had the power and the discernment to choose whose twelve men were going to shape the world. You might ask yourself, well, why pray?

You know, so often I've thought of this. Why pray? God knows all of our needs before we ask. God Himself told us that. Why do we have to get on our knees? He knows. Why pray? The wonderful thing about prayer is this.

In prayer, God is not so interested in giving us the answer as He is in giving us Himself. God does know our needs. He is going to supply all of our needs according to His riches and glory by Christ Jesus.

As far as answers go, God could give that in a moment. But what God wants is that we learn to spend time in His presence and that we be drawn there, that we have real good reasons to come continually to Him.

And He gives us these human limitations. He gives us these needs. Why? So that we can just come again and exercise our dependence on the living God. Some people say, well, I pray actually all day long.

I'm in constant communion with God. And this is a wonderful thing to know that every day, no matter where you are, every moment, you can be in constant communion with the living God. And yet let us not allow this fact from times when all we do is just get alone with nothing else to do and just be alone in a room with the living God.

You know, it's when you love someone, you love to be around them. But you also love to be alone with them at certain times. I think one of the reasons why God honors evenings of prayer is because after you've spent an evening in prayer for something and then God gives the answer, you know that this answer came from God.

If you were just walking down the street and praying as you go about your normal everyday work and you didn't set aside time just to get alone with God, you might think, well, I'm in communion with God, but God really used my gift.

God used my power to bring in these answers. But God likes to get us alone in a room. And just let us spend hours there with Him. That will mean nothing if God does not answer prayer. But hours, that will mean everything.

If God does answer prayer. This is faith. So often it doesn't take any faith to just pray when we're walking around in our normal everyday life. Most of us either talk to ourselves or we talk to God just about all the time when we're going around and we're thinking.

And so naturally our thoughts turn into words many times. But oh my, it takes faith to get on your knees and spend time before Him. Because you think, my, I could be out doing something. I could be doing that.

I could be thinking about this. I could be studying that. And yet when we're on our knees and just praying and just getting absorbed with the presence of God, we realize that we're putting our entire dependence on the fact that God does hear and answer prayer.

God just likes to sometimes see us in humility before Him. Why does the Bible speak so much of fasting? I just went through the Bible and counted 57 times in the Bible when people fasted. At least 57 times in the Word of God it mentions that people fasted.

Why? Is there any fasting? Is there some merit in asceticism? Of course not. The merit, or not the merit, let us not call it merit, but rather let us call it the blessing, is humbling ourselves before God.

Showing in a very real way our dependence on the living God. When you fast, your strength goes. You're not able to think or work as effectively as when you don't fast. Usually this is true. And yet, when we get on our knees and we're weak, and we say, oh Lord, we've not slept, we've not eaten, then all of our weakness is turned into the spiritual strength of the living God.

And if you want to see someone come to Christ, if you want to see someone's life changed, and then to see that life matured in Jesus Christ, you're going to have to learn what it is to lay hold of God.

Because God is not going to give this great blessing where you really get desperate with Him. You know, you ask the question, why is there evil in the world? Why is there sin in the world? Why is God allowed to hell?

All of these questions tie in with why does prayer work? So many things that to the natural mind just seems to be foolishness. And yet we come to the conclusion that God has allowed all of these things, the environment in which we live, may be the most conducive for our spiritual growth in Jesus Christ.

The fact that we must pray draws us to God in prayer. The fact that there is sin makes us marvel at the cross of Jesus Christ, which, of course, was the place where sin was dealt with. And so everything in life has a purpose.

We're never going to see anything great accomplished unless we learn this purpose of prayer. Now, how are we going to pray as we go to prayer? What are we going to pray for? We're going to pray, we're going to ask God to give us hearts.

But what is our attitude going to be? You know, so often we pray and we say, well, now God is going to answer this prayer yes, or maybe He'll answer it no, maybe He'll give me a faithful man, maybe He won't.

But you know, as you read in 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul tells us that all the promises of God in Jesus Christ are yea and yea. They are not yes and no, but they're all yes. But the trouble is, so often we pray for something, we don't see it happen, and then we just sit back and we say it wasn't God's will.

Rather, what the Lord wants is that we pray for something, we get concerned about something, and we find out God's will about it. And then, after we have found God's will, not before we find God's will, it's no sense to pray about something if we don't know God's will.

Ask for God's will on it, and then pray, and pray in boldness as Hebrews tells us. Humbly, yes, we must come humbly, but boldly, because He invites us to come boldly. And God loves someone who comes and says, God, this is what your word says.

Let us obey it. So what we must do is go to prayer. And we consider, does God want me to have a faithful man or not? Well, we see this in the word of God. We see this in the lives of other people. We see the potential of this.

And we get driven to believe that God wants to do this in my life. So what do I do? I get on my knees and I pray. Do I say, Lord, if it is your will? Well, we've just found out it is the Lord's will. And then, we go to prayer and we say, God, I'm believing.

I'm believing that you're going to give me a faithful man. Each one of us over this year, the year 1963 -64, each one of us who are going to the Muslim world are believing that God is going to give us a faithful man or a faithful lady in the Muslim world.

Okay, what's going to happen after the first month? We haven't found our faithful man. What are we going to do? Are we going to say, well, maybe God just didn't want it. No. We're going to start wrestling.

This is what it means to wrestle in prayer. Because when you've seen something from God, you know it's from God. And even if the devil does come and say, oh, you prayed out of the will of God. Oh, I think of how many blessings we've lost.

How many blessings we've fumbled because we've listened to the devil's lie. Oh, you prayed out of the will of God. No, I think so often God has wanted to give us a blessing and he's wanted us to just cry unto him and just to claim this thing.

And if he doesn't give it to spend that evening in prayer to God, but if he still doesn't get it to set aside some time of fasting and just waiting on him, humbling ourselves. You know, God will not give an answer for something like this until he has you just like a little baby.

God wants you to just be so broken of everything, broken of your pride, broken of all selfish desires and just laid out before him and just saying, God, you promised it and you are going to fulfill it.

And whatever you ask of me, I'm going to do to see it come to pass. I think of so many times in my life where I've asked God for something and he hasn't given that thing until the very last moment. And then when he gives it, it's right after I've spent some real time in desperate crying to God.

Persistent Prayer and the Discipline of Obedience

I think of one Christmas a group of us went down to Mexico, just the way many of you will be going down to Mexico. And each one of this little group as we were going down there, we each one asked God to give us a faithful man.

We said, Lord, give us someone that we can disciple in Jesus Christ. And I think of one young man by the name of Greg Livingston, a very good friend of mine. He had also prayed this prayer. But the very last night that we were in Mexico, he still had not found his faithful man.

He was looking all over and he hadn't found a faithful man. It was midnight and we were going to be leaving in a few hours. We were going to leave around four o 'clock in the morning to go back to the States.

And he came to me and he said, you know, I haven't found my faithful man. And you know what my reaction was? I said, well, maybe you have found him and you just don't know him. You see, God doesn't work that way.

I was just trying to rationalize. I was just trying to get ourselves off the hook. Because we had prayed, we had claimed it and now we haven't seen it. I was even thinking of saying, well, maybe God answered this prayer.

No. And oh my, how the devil would have just loved to deceive Greg and get him to fumble the blessing. But he didn't fumble. He went out even at midnight and was looking all over for that faithful man.

Pretty soon he found a man. He came running back to me and he said, you know, I found one. And the man, he led him to the Lord Jesus Christ. And he said that the man wanted to really go on to the Lord.

And that fellow has been working with the work in Mexico ever since. You see, what happens? God just postpones the blessing until he sees us get desperate. God just postpones the blessing until he sees us get desperate.

Oh, how often we just presume on the Lord. Oh, how often we just say, well, God is going to do what he wants. And we don't like to get involved in this warfare. We'll believe, we'll have the kind of faith that sits back on a comfortable divine and just says, well, if God wants to do it, he will do it.

I have faith in him. We have that sort of faith, which isn't faith at all. It's presumption. But we just seem to lack that faith that gets on its knees and just say, oh, God, whatever the cost, you're going to bring this to pass.

If you have any doubts in your mind as you think over these things, if you have any doubts whether God's going to give you a man or not, he probably won't. But if you'll just lay hold of this by faith and just say, oh, God, I don't understand it.

I don't understand how prayer works. I don't understand how prevailing works. But I'm going to believe. And, oh, God, if you don't give a man within three or four months or whenever you want to set a time, however God leads you, sometimes he leads us differently about these things about time, well, then you just say, oh, God, I'm going to go into prayer all night, whenever it takes.

But I'm going to see it come to pass. Of course, we cannot substitute this thing of praying all night or fasting for obedience. You know, sometimes we like to do that. Obedience is the key thing. We're going to make some of these contacts.

Oh, we've prayed. We've claimed it. We say, we know this is God's will. And we go through the Bible and we start trying to obey everything that we find in the Word of God because we realize that this is necessary.

Oh, we must do something practical. It's time to get off the knees. Jesus Christ spent the night in prayer, but then he got busy the next morning. And so, how are we going to get busy? We must be alert all the time.

Even after you find your faithful man, you should still be alert. After we find our faithful man, that's no time to rest and say, oh, praise the Lord. We got the blessing. That's the time to buckle in and look for more and see more souls come to him.

Finding Receptive People and Learning from Other Workers

So we look for contacts everywhere we go. At school, we look for contacts. At work, we look for contacts. In house-to-house distribution, we look for contacts because so often this is an ideal place to find your contacts.

Here you are selling a book, Peace with God. Here's a man who wants peace with God. An ideal opportunity to present to him the Lord Jesus Christ. Traveling on a train or on a bus. Another thing we must do in making these contacts is to pray for wisdom and how to recognize someone who's receptive.

You know, so often we can get decoyed. You know how the hunters put out decoys. So often we can get decoyed. We can see someone that looks receptive and spend a lot of time on him and then find out that he wasn't interested at all.

And oh, we must be alert. We must seek the wisdom of the Holy Spirit in this. And then, another thing we ought to do is talk with other people who are interested in winning souls to Jesus Christ. Learn from them.

Maybe they haven't even done as well as you in this and yet everyone can teach everyone else something. Everyone has an experience which no one else has. And so you ought to be asking your friends, your classmates, how have you gone about this?

What have you done? What are some ways that you've found effective in winning souls to Jesus Christ? Inquire from each other. Don't be so proud that you cannot humble yourself even from the least of the brethren and ask them some hints in practical ways.

Another thing is go with someone who's doing so well. Go with them. Just say, you know, I want to go with you the next time you go out in the street and talk to people about Christ. I want to go with you the next time you go over to the university and talk to people about Christ.

And just learn. Just see the way he does it. You might be able to give him some ideas on how to sharpen his own testimony. And if nothing else, you'll certainly learn. Another thing that we should keep in mind is let's look at the disciples that Christ chose.

The Qualities to Seek in Potential Disciples

What are some things that all of them had in common? One thing, they were all young. They were all young men. Oh, maybe they were 20. Maybe they were 30. But you don't find any of them that were, let's say, 40 or 50 or 60 years old.

They were young. I suppose at the very most, maybe some of them might have been around 40. I don't know the age, but I know that it seems as though most of them outlived the Lord Jesus Christ many, many years.

And so it seems as though they must have been about the same age of Christ. Somewhere probably in their 30s or early 40s or maybe even younger than that. Young people have a whole life to give. And as we go out looking for people, let's not try to find the old women 80 years old to make them our faithful hearts.

Now these people need the gospel. And we should not neglect the old people. There's a wonderful ministry. And yet, if you feel led to do something like that, why not go and find some young person, lead him to Christ, and take him along with you to reach the older ones as well.

Because in the work of Jesus Christ we do not find sentimental feelings that often we find in Christian circles today. But rather we see a wisdom of God that really in the final manifestation of itself reached everyone.

Christ's main work was with young people. With those men that were in their 20s and 30s. This was his main work. And yes, those men went out and reached the other day. But let us be careful that we don't lose this strategy.

Another important thing to remember is that the ones that Christ discipled were intelligent men. Now I realize that the Bible says that some of them were not educated. But everyone was intelligent. They all had an alert mind.

Things that could grasp. Minds that could grasp things of importance. And especially spiritual things. Another thing about these disciples were they were receptive for more. Receptive for more. It's impossible to make an unsaved person your faithful man as we speak about having faithful men.

Only saved people can fit into that category. So that God turned from the Jews to provoke the Gentiles. To provoke the Jews to jealousy. I think so often many of us try to witness to our parents and to our loved ones as we call it.

And yet, perhaps one of the greatest witnesses to these people would be to turn from them after we presented the gospel of Jesus Christ and love to them. To turn from them and to others. And to feed others with the gospel and let them see how others are receiving the gospel of Christ as well.

So often we can just get bound with this thing to our unsaved relatives and our unsaved loved ones. And find that they don't really have any desire. And sometimes we can even deceive ourselves in saying that these people who don't even have an interest are going to become.

One point to keep in mind is that Christ gave every person as much of himself as they wanted. Christ never withheld himself. He would never say well, I'm too busy. Or well, you're too old. Or well, you're not intelligent enough.

He always gave as much as they wanted. And yet, you will find that most people just don't want very much. The thing that we find in the Muslim world is that many people are to come and to spend much time with us to learn English or to learn some other language or to learn about other things.

Perhaps some policeman comes with the idea of learning what this little group is all about. And we must watch that we don't get in such traps and waste our time on things that are not really very important.

Discipling New Believers Through Scripture, Prayer, and Worship

After this one that we've been dealing with accepts the Lord and we begin to disciple him. Here we have a man who's come to Christ. And we're ready to begin the work of discipling. What are we going to do with him?

How are we going to disciple him? What's going to be the message once he comes to this position? Here again, in Christian Strategy and Born to Reproduce there are many things that I'm not mentioning on this tape because I take for granted that each one of you are reading those booklets.

And so this is sort of a supplementary tape. One thing, chapter 8, verse 31, you should get in the Word together with your faithful man. He's not going to be able to go through the Word of God very much himself and understand much at first, probably.

But you and he can go together and you can train him in how to get the Word of God out for himself. Point number two is that Acts 8, 13 teaches us you can go witnessing together with him. Point number three, as the past Jesus shows us, that prayer before he was nailed to the cross, that evening of prayer before he was nailed to the cross, he took his disciples with him.

Prayer together. Prayer in reality. As Acts, the first two chapters of Acts teaches particularly the second chapter and the 44th through 47th verses teach us the Lord together with your individual. Take him to the church that you're going to and ingrain in him a desire to worship the living God.

If you can get your faithful man really lost in worshiping God, this is one of the greatest assurances you can have in your heart that that man is going to go on for the Lord Jesus Christ. Because when a man passes from this stage of unbelief to belief, that's a great change.

And when he passes from this stage of just feeding on the milk of the Word to the meat of the Word, this is a great change. And when he passes from this stage of having some superficial, zealous feelings on the surface to a man who has a heart worshiping the living God, this is a great change.

What does it mean to do this together? I mentioned getting the Word together, witness together, pray together, worship together. What does this word together mean? You might like to write down this statement.

Particularly those of you who are going to be going to foreign fields. And of course, all of you will probably be going down to Mexico or over to Europe. And here is the statement. You be like him in every way you can.

You be like him in every way he be like you. In all other ways like you. And what does this statement mean? You be like him in every way you can. In all other ways he be like you. What does this mean?

How are you going to be like him? How are you, the soul men, going to be like your faithful man? In language. Those of us who are going to work in a different language area, learn the language of the people.

In clothes, dress like the people. In a house, live similarly to the people. Don't live way above them, like the people. Another thing that is very interesting is especially for you Americans, is in many countries, especially in the Middle East, the men, when they meet each other, they don't just shake hands, but they put their arms around each other and love each other.

And the women will do that to each other as well. Now for some of us who are from the North, in America, this may be very difficult. It may mean breaking to our pride. It may mean breaking to our form.

Breaking with our culture and jumping into his culture. To be like him in every way that we can. Of course, there are some things that we must remember about this statement. It's a general statement that doesn't apply to some specifics.

For example, your personality will be different than his. God doesn't want you to make his personality like yours. And then the leading of God's will in certain areas, just because you're a plumber on the South side of Chicago, doesn't mean he should be a plumber on the South side of Chicago.

There is great liberty in this matter. Or should he become like you? You become like him in language, clothes, house, food, and other customs. How should he be like you? In the word, he should become like you.

In witness, he should be like you. In prayer, he should be like you. In worship, he should be like you. Remember Paul said, follow me. He didn't say follow Christ. He did say follow Christ sometimes. But sometimes he said, follow me.

So this means that our lives are free and it's pliable in the hands of God as the apostle Paul said. So you know what this means? It just means that we have to listen to all these orientation tapes, all these books that we've been reading, and especially the word of God itself and let our lives become broken before him.

Examples of Reproduction in Turkey

I would like to run through with you fairly quickly some personal examples that we've had in the land of Turkey of how God has taken someone who wasn't a contact, made him a contact, got him saved, and then began training him in Jesus Christ.

I think of one contact who came through a girl by the name of Christa. She'd only been saved about two years or maybe even less than that. A girl who fled from East Germany, read The Peace With God in Madrid and was saved.

How did she make her contact? She was in Ankara. She was at a school learning Turkish. She invited two girls to come over to our place to have lunch. One professor came along to do some translation work.

He came. He showed a real interest in the Bible because after we eat, we always read from the Bible. He showed a real interest so he began coming twice a week to do translation work. And then he accepted the Lord.

And then he began coming with us to worship the Lord and to praise the Lord together. I think of another man when he was in America, this second man. He was contacted through some Christians there. They got to know him.

So then they told me about him and I went over to visit him in Ankara. We had him over for supper. We read the Bible as we always do. He showed an interest. We asked him to translate something for us.

He translated it. A little booklet, My Heart, Christ's Home, brought by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. And as he was translating it, he asked Jesus Christ to come into his heart. Then we began working together, doing translation work together, worshiping the Lord together.

And he is growing in Jesus Christ. I think of another fellow that I met in school. We had one class every week together in the school. After class, we just happened to bump into each other and begin talking.

Sometimes I would write some little article about the cross of Christ or something. I'd give it to him to check it over. And through this, he has shown a tremendous interest in Jesus Christ. And even though he hasn't yet accepted, as far as I know, at least outwardly, he does have a great desire to learn these things.

I think of another friend who was introduced to me by a friend of mine. He was an electrician. So I invited him to come over to our house to fix our electric light that wasn't working. He came over. He had a meal with us.

We spoke with him out of the Word of God. He accepted the Lord. And then, the very next day, he was out selling house to house with one of our workers. This is the pattern. We spend time in prayer. We rebel against these thoughts.

And then, we confess it to God. And we say, Oh, God, I don't understand how all this works. I feel rebellion in my heart. So often, when we hear something new, we rebel against it. But you pray about it.

You go through the Word of God. Read Born to Reproduce. Read Christian Strategy. Let God convince you about this. And then, once you get convinced, just say, Lord, I will not be satisfied until I see this happen.