MOST Churches Don't Understand Discipleship! | Pastor Reacts

We are constantly running our race. And so we need to surround ourselves with brothers and sisters who can help us run our race well. The moment that we think that we can get away with doing this Christian walk on our own, that's when we get ourselves into all kinds of trouble.

We were not meant to be alone as Christians. There is no such thing as a lone ranger Christian. When somebody says, I'm a Christian, I don't go to church. Discipleship, what is it? Great question, great question.

What Discipleship Is Not: Not a Short Class or an App

I can tell you what it's not. First, right? A lot of churches treat discipleship as if it's a class that you take for a couple of weeks. And that's where you get introduced to church and theology. And those classes are good as far as they go.

But after a couple of weeks, you graduate and then you just go sit in the big sanctuary every Sunday. And that's the extent of discipleship. Nope, that's not it. I remember a couple of years ago, I was invited to be a consultant for a huge youth organization, huge, huge.

I mean, these guys were putting on gigantic youth camps and seminars every year. I mean, it was impressive, the numbers of students that were coming in. But their developers, they were developing an app and they wanted me to come take a look at their discipleship app that they were putting together.

And so the CEO was very kind. He flew me out and we sat down and had some meetings. I looked at their app and how it worked. But what they had done was they created an app that would essentially disciple the students.

Did you hear that? Did you hear what I just said? The app was essentially going to disciple the students. And the idea was you get a group of students together, right, in a little small group situation, you pull up the app on someone's phone and then you just kind of put it in the center of the group and then just press play, essentially.

Now, these guys, their heart was in the right place, but this notion that an app can accomplish discipleship for you, or it's a class that you can take online for a couple of weeks is so egregiously wrong, friends.

Jesus as the Model for Discipleship

Jesus was a first century itinerant rabbi. Okay, he's our model for discipleship. Jesus traveled around with next to no money. He taught wherever he went and he had a group of young Jews. By the way, I think the disciples of Jesus, they were teenagers, okay?

They were of teenage years. They were known as the Talmadim. These were his disciples. And Jesus followed a very uniquely Jewish customary system of discipleship. I think the biblical model of discipleship is captured quite nicely in Luke chapter six, verse 40, which is, by the way, the first sermon that I ever preached on.

That's how so important it is, in my opinion. Luke chapter six, verse 40. A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher, okay? There's kind of our broad sort of overview of discipleship.

Today, we have a word for this. It's called apprenticeship, wherein you have like this master teacher that brings an apprentice under his or her wing and then shows them everything about how they perform certain tasks.

And then the apprentice practices what they learn so that they can then after a set amount of time, they can go out and perform those tasks on their own. I had to do this as a public school teacher. I had to go through this process where I had a master teacher, which by the way, I was at the worst school in the district.

There were gangs everywhere. There was a pig farm not too far away. Every morning, the scent of pigs and mud and I don't know, blood, it was just like permeating. It was disgusting. It was awful. But I learned my craft by coming under the wing of my master teacher.

And she taught me and she evaluated me. And then she sent me out to my own classroom. That's discipleship, friends. You see examples of this, not only with Jesus, but also with Elijah and Elisha, where towards the end there, Elisha was so close to Elijah.

He traveled, he did everything with him that towards the end, he was crying out, my father, my father, when God took Elijah away. You know what I mean? That's the dynamic of relationship that we should be seeking to employ today.

And I'm gonna, if I can, I'll circle back around because I think I see this on the question here. What does this look like practically today in church small groups or whatever? I'm gonna talk about that.

But let me just say this. If we look at Jesus, there was a very specific way that he accomplished discipleship. You know, there's a book, Bill Hull has written a lot of great stuff on discipleship, H-U-L-L, Bill Hull.

And so my focus at the church that I was pastoring at for years was on discipleship and training up leaders in the area of discipleship and discipling other people. And so when I was doing my research and giving these talks and all that stuff, I was really trying to study Jesus' model of discipleship.

But I relied a lot on Bill Hull's scholarship because it's pretty thorough. So there's a great book that he wrote. He wrote a number of them. One of them is called Jesus Christ Disciple Maker. I encourage you to look at that.

Robbie Gallaty is a pastor in Tennessee. He's also someone who has written on the subject, but he's like more for laypersons, you know, so not as seminary-like. And he wrote a book called Rediscovering Discipleship.

That's a great book. So anyway, I'm just bringing them up because their books on this issue are very helpful. Robbie Gallaty suggests that Jesus essentially followed four phases of making disciples, okay?

Four Phases of Making Disciples

Number one, now track this, okay? Number one, Jesus ministered and the disciples watched, okay? So in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught God's truths while the disciples observed and they listened and they learned as part of the crowd.

And so that's in Matthew five through seven, right? When Jesus, when he went into the synagogue and he healed the lame and he cleansed the lepers and he gave hearing to the deaf, the disciples were there to watch him through all of those things.

So that's the first one. The second one, and you'll notice and you'll track this transition and it's subtle, but there's a shift. The second one is that Jesus allowed the disciples to assist him in ministry.

So they go from observing to now assisting and Jesus is still leading. So when Jesus, perfect example, when Jesus fed the multitude, he broke the bread, he performed the miracle, but the disciples were the ones that distributed the supernatural meal around to the hungry crowd and then they went around and collected the surplus.

So that's the second one. Here's the third one. The disciples shifted, so now they're doing the ministry and now Jesus is assisting. This was Jesus' model of discipleship. So after his transfiguration, it's a perfect example, Jesus came down from the mountain and he walked straight into a crowd that was in a total uproar.

The disciples had been trying to cast out a demon from a possessed boy and they were failing miserably. And so in utter frustration and desperation, the boy's father turns to Jesus and he wants him to intervene.

I brought my son to your disciples, they couldn't do anything. And so the father's distraught, the boy's still possessed, so Jesus steps in, cast out the demon and made the boy whole. And then later Jesus turned and rebuked the disciples who were powerless on their own by saying, you know what, this kind can't be driven out by anything but prayer.

In another place it says prayer and fasting, right? So that's the disciples doing the ministry themselves and Jesus coming alongside to assist them. What's the last step? Finally, here it is, Jesus watched while the disciples went out and ministered to others.

Jesus sent them out with instructions to go into the world. Wise disciple, our name comes from the moment that Jesus sends out the disciples, okay, Matthew 10. He says, go into the world, you know, cast out demons, preach the gospel.

So they do that, then they come back and they say to Jesus, Lord, even the demons are subject to your name or to us, right, in your name. Anyway, this kind of brings me to the second question here, right?

How Biblical Discipleship Works in Practice

How does one partake in biblical discipleship? Okay, yeah. We, so how do you translate this? That's how I take the question. We have to maintain the model of Jesus' discipleship that we see in the New Testament.

And so I've taught this to others. I've run this kind of a structure of a group multiple times over the last number of years. I'm in one right now, but there's a very simple way to translate Jesus' model for today's church and it boils down to this.

Get a group of folks together, preferably same sex, right? Preferably men with men or ladies with ladies, okay? They get them together. They have to decide to get together for an agreed upon duration of time.

This is not a fellowship group where we're gonna make a lot of delicious food and we're gonna get fat and old together. No, this is only for a duration of time so that they can accomplish a few things together.

And here's how the structure is. Pray first, confess sin, and hold each other accountable, and exhort and encourage each other. By the way, Christians, horrible at this. Horrible at this. Horrible at hearing other people's sins and horrible at exhorting, encouraging.

Horrible at it. So we need to get better. Let's do this. Let's get into these groups and do this thing. James wrote that faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. It's not about knowing things about God, but applying what you know as you submit to the change that God is making in you.

That's why we gotta confess. That's where spiritual growth comes in. And you just can't grow spiritually if you're not confessing your sin, if you're not warring against the flesh with the help of your brothers.

And again, ladies, you need other ladies around you in this time of confession.

All right?

And maybe also part of the accountability for the group is that you do things as kind of like homework, right? So maybe you set up a goal and your goal is, well, I'm gonna share the gospel with at least one person before we meet again together next week.

Then I want you to hold me accountable to that. I want you to ask me, have you done it yet? What are the opportunities? Get me to be thinking about it and to be intentional about it, because that's how it's gonna happen.

Or maybe another goal is to serve your other brothers and sisters in some capacity the way that Jesus did, right? But this is all under the broader category of accountability. So it's pray, confession, and accountability.

Then it's read the scripture together, read the scripture together, and then it's memorize scripture. So I don't know if you're noticing, but I'm kind of spitting things out pretty fast, and that comes from memorizing the scripture.

I kind of look at it, memorizing scripture, as allowing the word of God to surround you so that the Holy Spirit can bring to mind the appropriate memorization passage when it's needed. Because that's what's been happening in my experience is the more that you memorize the word, the more that you memorize scripture, something will happen out in the real world and you'll be like, there it is.

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this, be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to get angry. For human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires, amen? So it's gotta be read the scripture, memorize the scripture, and then pray again.

And that's it, okay, that's it. And you do that one time a week, get about three to five guys together, three to five ladies. It's a very simple formula, and you just keep doing it over and over again for a short period of time, maybe nine months, maybe 12 months, maybe a little bit longer.

But the group should stay rather small, okay? You get a little bit bigger beyond five people, and then you end up getting sort of bogged down. You need to be able to stay focused in a smaller group environment.

And so that's been my experience running these kinds of things. After all of this is done, you need to break the group up so that they can go and disciple more people, okay? That is the way that the Great Commission is fulfilled.

Once you pour into somebody as a discipleship leader, those people should have what they need to go be discipleship leaders and start their own groups. And towards the end of the group, you should be praying with everybody, who are you gonna bring to me, Lord, so that I can start my own D group?

We call it D group. And so this actually leads to the last question. Does discipleship end? The discipleship structure, John, never ends. If you follow the model that I've just laid out, it never ends.

You either are discipled by a D group leader, or you are the D group leader, but you're constantly staying in a discipleship structure, and you should.

Why?

Because we are constantly being sanctified. We should constantly be sanctified. We should constantly mature. We are constantly running our race. And so we need to surround ourselves with brothers and sisters who can help us run our race well.

The moment that we think that we can get away with doing this Christian walk on our own, that's when we get ourselves into all kinds of trouble. We were not meant to be alone as Christians. There is no such thing as a lone ranger Christian.

When somebody says, I'm a Christian, I don't go to church. So the discipleship structure never ends.