August 14, 2023 Show with A. M. Brewster on “Practical Discipleship”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson,

19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports

legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning

issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man

sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to

have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener,

with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on

the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 14th day of

August 2023.

And we are almost exactly one month away from the Future of

Christendom Conference that I have helped to arrange with the Mid -Atlantic Reformation

Society here in Pennsylvania, more specifically Lancaster County, and

even more specifically Mannheim, Pennsylvania.

The Future of Christendom Conference is the title of this conference on

the theme, The Gospel at War, and there are a number of speakers, but the keynote speaker is Dr. James R.

White of Alpha Omega Ministries, and this is being held Friday, September 15th

through Sunday, September 17th, at the Spooky Nook Sports and Events in

Mannheim, Pennsylvania, a luxurious, beautiful event center

where the gubernatorial candidate, Republican gubernatorial candidate,

during the most recent election here in Pennsylvania, had one of his major fundraising events.

And the theme of the debate that is included in this

three -day conference, which is being held on Saturday, September

16th, 3 .30 p .m. to 6 .30 p .m., is, Is Gay

Christian a Biblically Acceptable Identity for a Member of Christ's Church?

That is a debate between Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, who is

rejecting or opposing that thesis, and Dr. Gregory Coles, who is

approving or identifying with that thesis.

In fact, he identifies as a gay Christian himself.

So, if you want to be, if you want to attend these events, this three -day event including the debate,

please register as soon as possible at futureofchristendom .org, futureofchristendom

.org.

And by the way, when you register, free lunch and refreshments is

included with this package on Saturday, September 16th.

So register as quickly as possible so you get the lowest price for registering as

possible.

And now I'd like to introduce a returning guest who is a regular feature

on this program.

His name is A .M. Brewster.

If anybody listening today is a regular listener, that name is definitely not a

strange or unfamiliar.

Name to you.

He is president of Evermind Ministries, and he's a biblical counselor, author, podcaster, and

conference speaker.

And today we're going to be addressing practical discipleship.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, A .M. Brewster.

I mean, the name might be a little strange, not because it's unfamiliar, but just because it's associated with me.

So, hey, I'm super happy to be back.

It's been a little while, and I'm excited about today's conversation.

Well, remind our listeners about Evermind Ministries.

Yeah, so Evermind Ministries, for those of you who are familiar, is a group of

ministries.

And within that group of ministries, we have various elements that specifically

speak to various facets and needs within our lives.

Because the mission of Evermind Ministries is to keep God's truth at the center of the.

And our daily, weekly, monthly, yearly experiences are very robust.

Lots of things that we do and lots of places where we need God's truth injected into that.

And so, specifically, there is truth, love, family, which speaks to parenting and marriage.

There is celebration of God.

That's where I was going with that.

Celebration of God is specifically on the topics of personal and interpersonal

discipleship, which is, obviously, we're going to be talking a lot about that today, as well as worship.

And I believe, if we can throw it out there, there's a little bit of a tease.

Chris and I are going to be having a conversation about worship next Monday at this time.

That's the plan at the moment, anyway.

So, that comes a lot from the work that we do in celebration of God.

And then there's Faith Tree Biblical Counseling and Discipleship, which deals both with crisis counseling as well as the

general discipleship and growth therein.

And then AM Brewster Ministries, which is how I travel and speak and write and things like that.

And that is the totality, at the moment, of Evermind Ministries.

And I want to just tell everyone right now, we have an app.

You can go to evermindministries .com and get a link to download that app.

It's a free app.

Tons of amazing resources on there.

It's growing and growing more and more.

And anyone who's familiar with me on this show, I always try to create a page where you can learn

more.

You can kind of study more of the topic that Chris and I are talking about.

And that's normally hosted at truthloveparent .com.

But now in the app, we will have a special tab where you can go and see the

interviews that I do and the extra content that I put out there for you to continue your study of this topic.

So, you can find that link at evermindministries .com.

You can find that link pretty much at any of our ministries.

So, there we are.

I just threw a whole bunch at you.

Great.

So, it's evermindministries .com, and is it forward slash iron or something?

Well, evermindministries .com is where they can get the link to the app.

And once they get into the app, they'll be able to find it pretty easily, the interviews and this interview with you here.

But then, yes, truthloveparent .com forward slash iron is also where they can access our

previous interviews and get a link to this one as well.

So, you have those two different websites, evermindministries

and evermindministries .com and also truthloveparent .com.

Yep.

Actually, we have a bunch of websites trying to keep it all more streamlined, and the app is really helping

keeping everything in one place.

But yeah, there's a website for every one of our ministries.

So, Faith Tree and Evermind and Truth Love Family and Celebration of God.

Great.

Well, we have a theme today that you have chosen with the

theme of which is practical discipleship.

Perhaps give an overview of what discipleship means.

Every person who's been a Christian for any reasonable length of time

should completely understand that or at least understand it to some level.

But as I've said before, we have listeners who are brand -new Christians, and we have listeners who are not

Christians at all.

We have listeners who are atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Orthodox

Jews, Roman Catholics, and I could go on and on.

Even on occasion, we hear from a member of a cult, but they may not be

familiar with that theme as it is utilized by

a Bible -believing evangelical Christian.

So, why don't you explain, at least in summary form, what that means.

Yeah, definitely.

In fact, I just want to be fair.

Yes, that long list of individuals you named and anyone else who doesn't necessarily familiar with the

Christianese, as some people put it, the church language, sometimes high church language, definitely

might be like, okay, disciple.

I kind of feel like I understand what that means.

But what about the actual church?

And I'd have to say, just from my own experience, both with myself, but then with working with

counselees and the like, I have found that really, the average Christian

doesn't have a really fantastic working definition and understanding of what it really means to be

a disciple.

And I know that saying that might cause the hair to raise in the back of someone's neck.

Like, what is he talking about?

You know, average Christian doesn't.

Well, and again, this is just from my experience.

I went really through probably multiple decades of my Christian

life.

I was saved at the age of nine by God's grace and engaged in sanctification.

But with the exception of my parents, there really was very little

life -on -life discipleship, personal, individual discipleship that went on.

Now, it may have been due to the fact that I moved around a lot as a young person and as an adult.

I've moved 22 times in my life, which for some of you is like, wow, that's so much.

And others of you, you haven't even touched how many times I've moved.

But those of us who moved around a lot recognize that that does have an impact from time to time on our

relationships, the depth and the length of them.

And so, it really wasn't until probably my late 30s that I started to better understand, and

definitely into my 40s where I started to better understand

what discipleship requires of us.

So, with that said, I wanted to just kind of bring everyone in today.

I don't want anyone who's grown up in the church to be like, well, I've heard that word a lot.

I know what that word means.

I want us all to reevaluate our understanding of discipleship by what we're going to see here today.

Not because I'm going to present a new concept or new ideas, but because I think we

need to look at the material again biblically and come face -to -face with whether or not we're actually

engaging with that.

And so, I have three main points today.

I want to make this practical.

I want to make it relatively simple.

But three main ideas that we're going to look at.

And we're going to look at authority within the context of discipleship.

We're going to look at time within the context of discipleship.

And we're going to look at content.

And I hope that by the end of this conversation today, those three things are going to really help us to better understand what

discipleship is and then how it progresses in our lives.

And if you want, Chris, I can jump into the first one or if there's something else you want to say.

Chris.

Sure, definitely.

No, go ahead.

Jared Okay.

I was trying to think about the order of these points.

You know, where should I start?

And I really wanted to start with time.

I wanted to start with that one because I think that that's actually just a huge issue that we have in our modern

Western Christian thought when it comes down to really practical discipleship is what we do with our

time.

But I realized that there was a more foundational thing I needed to discuss first, and that is this idea of

authority.

Now, when we talk about authority, so many things should come into our minds.

So many things probably do come into our minds.

Again, as a – you know, I don't know exactly Chris's demographic.

I know people from all over the world listen.

I've got a friend, a regular listener who listens in from the Philippines.

But I will definitely say from a Westernized idea, the concept of authority is something that,

you know, the quote -unquote cowboy American really wants to push off, run away from,

be free, be my own person.

I don't want the man telling me what to do and stuff like that.

But from a biblical context, authority, the Christian needs to be looking at it very differently from the

worldling.

And there are three types of authority that all have a significant impact on this discussion when we're talking

about discipleship.

The first kind of authority that we see in the scriptures is what I refer to as inherent authority.

And I call it inherent authority because God has said because of your

title or because of who you are or because of whatever other stipulations the Lord may list out in his

word, you inherently have authority because thus saith the Lord.

Because God, I said so, says God.

And some examples of that would be obviously God himself.

By virtue of the fact that he is the creator, sovereign God, king of the universe, he has all

inherent authority.

He gets to say how we live our lives.

He gets to say what discipleship is.

He gets to define our terms.

He gets to set the expectations and the boundaries of our lives.

Beyond that, though, and this is where we start to struggle.

And by the way, tons of people struggle with that.

The idea of submitting to a God that we can't see or who hasn't spoken to us face -to -face or so

on and so forth, very, very difficult for many people.

But it's even more difficult oftentimes even for Christians because, yes, I understand that I'm supposed to

submit to God and he does everything right and he does everything good and I trust him.

But he wants me to submit to my parents.

You see, my government, my husband, my pastor.

You see, these people are flawed.

Sometimes these people aren't even born again.

And they do very wrong things themselves.

They don't lead me the way they should.

They're sometimes bad people.

And yet God says, no, due to the fact that this person is your husband or

he's your parent or because he's a government official or your pastor, you need to

submit to him or her, depending sometimes in certain situations, obviously with the parents and with the government

officials.

That can count.

It won't count for the husbands and it won't count for the pastors.

And we struggle with that because we like to justify that, well, I don't I shouldn't have to submit to this person

because they're not who they should be.

That was, you know, growing up, I struggled a lot with that with me and my dad.

My dad oftentimes had really great things to say, but I thought that he wasn't saying them in the best ways.

I didn't like the way he communicated it.

I justified not obeying him because I saw all the flaws in him and basically had that, well, who is he

to tell me how to live my life type of an approach.

But that's sin.

God has given him inherent authority because of the fact that he was my father.

And as a biblical counselor, I work a lot in marriage counseling and it's difficult.

It really, really is very difficult to see a woman and work with a woman who has an

ungodly husband, an unsaved husband.

But the reality is unless he is commanding her to sin, she does have the responsibility to submit to his authority.

And so we have this idea of inherent authority, which is very real

and very important.

And it's one last thing to say about that.

Again, I've made it clear, but I want to kind of say it this particular way, is that this inherent authority

has nothing to do with the person's character and everything to do with their position.

That's basically what it comes down to.

Beyond that, though, there is another type, actually two other types of authority that I've seen, I've witnessed in

this world as we progress through life, things that we, how we engage with people.

And this next one is invited authority, invited authority.

And invited authority is really, it's pretty simple.

It's when I invite somebody else to be an authority in my life, whether they deserve it or

not.

And this is a, this has a lot to do with trust.

It has a lot to do with influence.

I've had a lot of conversations with people about what it takes to be, to have a relationship with

somebody where they trust you, where they can, you

know, as a biblical counselor, I do this a lot.

You know, what do I have to do to have a person feel confident they can open up to me?

The reality is, is that I can do very little because people choose who they're going to trust.

Every single day of the week, people are choosing to trust individuals who are, in

fact, very demonstrably untrustworthy.

And every day of the week, they're choosing not to trust people who have proven themselves over and over and over again to be trustworthy.

The average young person, I think, is an unfortunately perfect example.

They trust their peers and their entertainers and the influencers in their lives who are

telling them to do things and live in ways that they shouldn't, but they don't trust their parents who are, you know, in

this particular example I'm giving, are born again and are trying to help them to see life the way that God created it.

And so, this invited authority is a really dangerous one because the authority in and of itself is wrapped up in me as

the individual.

I invite Chris or I invite this Instagram person or I invite this person into my life

to have this authority in my life to tell me how to live my life based off of the fact that I've decided that

you should have the right or means to do so.

This is the basic idea of idolatry, you know?

Someone sets a – the Bible talks a lot about people creating an idol and setting it up and worshipping it.

Well, that person, the idolatry started first in themselves.

They were worshipping themselves.

They put their desires to have a God other than Yahweh in their lives, their desire, even

like the children of Israel with the golden calf.

They said, oh, well, even though he doesn't want us to create a graven image, we're going to make this golden

calf and it's going to represent him.

And because they decided that they were the ones who had the right to do that, it was

idolatrous authority.

It was authority invested in them, which they then handed off to this other person or this other entity to

say, hey, you have the right to tell me how to live my life.

Again, this is internet influencers.

These are friends, teachers, and other thought leaders.

Sometimes it's just the mob.

This screaming, rioting mob out there and we give them the rights to be our

authority, to dictate to us how we're supposed to live our lives.

And sometimes that is that's because, you know, we like what they have to

say.

We agree with what they have to say and so, like, we get ourselves in this echo chamber and we just follow after them.

And sometimes it's actually out of fear, communistic, socialistic, you know,

dictatorial governments.

The mob is something that says do what we tell you to do or else and we capitulate out of fear.

I think the early 2020 and 2021 gave us an example

of what this what happens when we get afraid of the mob and we're willing to

capitulate to whatever they have to say.

We've given them authority in our lives that they don't deserve to have and we've invited them.

Now, those are the ones we interact with frequently.

But there's a third category, a really important category when it comes to the topic of discipleship.

Obviously, the inherent authority is super important because God gets to define discipleship.

The invited authority is good, but it's also dangerous because oftentimes we invite

people to speak into our lives who shouldn't.

They shouldn't have the authority.

But this last category is called inherited authority, inherited authority.

And who has inherited authority?

Well, honestly, everybody does, specifically Christians.

But everybody has inherited authority, and I'll explain it this way.

As a martial artist, when I would work with my students, sometimes I'd have to step aside to work with a

smaller group or an individual in something.

And the rest of the class would need to progress on so we weren't wasting time.

And so I would take one of the other students in the room and I would

turn to them and I would bow to them.

We would turn and we would bow to the class.

And that was a symbolic action on my part saying that, okay, class, I have just

taken my authority and I have imbued it in this student.

This person who otherwise wouldn't be an authority in your life is now because I've given that authority

to them.

And they, the students in that class were then responsible to do whatever that other student told them

to do as if I had told them to do it.

Now, there's a responsibility on both sides in that situation.

There's a responsibility on the white belts and the yellow belts and so on and so forth to follow after this green belt who

isn't a black belt, isn't a third or fifth degree black belt.

But they're supposed to submit to them as if they were.

But there's also the responsibility on the green belt's side, the one who's I've given authority to lead the class.

It's his responsibility to lead as I would lead.

That's the whole expectation.

I'm giving you my authority.

He's an ambassador at that moment.

His whole thing is to run the class the way I would run the class.

And so there's a weight on both sides.

Well, biblically speaking, all Christians have that responsibility.

And we'll talk a lot more about this in the third point, the content point of this discussion.

But we all have the responsibility from God to speak his truth in love.

That's Ephesians 4 .15, the main verse of Truth, Love, Family.

That is our absolute responsibility and it's not speaking what I believe, how I would

choose to do it.

It's speaking God's truth in God's love.

Now, when I do that, it's really not about my authority as Aaron Brewster.

It's not about, well, you need to do this because I said so.

That's inherent authority.

I can do that as a parent.

Now, I would say the best type of parenting and the best type of government and the best type of husbanding and the best kind

of counseling and pastoring and all that kind of stuff is done with a mix of inherent authority and inherited authority.

But specifically, inherited authority is, you know, listen, you don't have any –.

I have no inherent authority in and of myself, but I am speaking God's word.

He has the ultimate inherent authority.

And because I am saying what he says, you're really not submitting to me so much as you are submitting to God.

Now, this has huge, huge application within the context of our discipleship.

Because if we're not talking about just like personal discipleship, if we're talking about as we're working

interpersonal relationship, working with other people, there has to be an authority structure.

It's not just my friend and I get together, and we talk about God's word, and we say, hey, that's nice, and we walk away.

No, there is an authority there.

There is God's inherent authority.

And sometimes, I'm going to just be honest, oftentimes what my discipling friend is going to have to do

in my life, he's going to have to come into my life and he's going to have to say, Aaron, thus saith the Lord.

It's not good enough just to mentally acquiesce to what this is saying.

You've got to live this, man, and you're not.

Like I said, we're going to talk a little bit more about how this breaks down and how it works later on.

But if we don't have this concept of not just God's inherent authority, but

of the body of Christ's inherited authority to be able to speak truth in love

into each other's lives, to sharpen each other, to rebuke and exhort and admonish and

reprimand, then our discipleship, really, it's going to be nothing more

than just a bunch of friends getting together, you know, talking about which sports teams they like best.

Well, we're going to go to our very first commercial break here.

If you have a question for A .M. Brewster, our email address is chrisarnsen

at gmail .com.

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -S -E -N at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Let's say you were involved in a church, or perhaps right now are,

and you believe that their approach to discipleship may be abusive in

some way.

Perhaps it's cultic, perhaps it's authoritarian, or perhaps it's the other way

around, 180 degrees different.

You have a church that does not practice discipleship in any way, shape, or form, and

basically it is a free -for -all where people just hear a message or get entertained and then

go about their business for the rest of the Lord's Day and for the rest of the week.

It could be anywhere in between as well.

But we understand why reasons like that, if you're a member of a church where you think that they have

failed miserably in this area, or you were a member, we understand that that would compel

you to remain anonymous if you're asking a question about that.

But if you're just asking a biblical question, a general question, please give us your first name at

least, city and state, and country of residence.

We'll be right back with A .M. Brewster right after these messages, so please do not go away.

The Mid -Atlantic Reformation Society presents The Future of Christendom 2023, The Gospel at

War, September 15th to the 16th in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, featuring Dr. James

White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

We are excited to be including a formal debate in this year's conference.

Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries will be debating Dr. Gregory Coles, author of Single Gay Christian,

A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity, the debate topic.

Is gay Christian a biblically acceptable identity for a member of Christ's church?

So come join us for the sixth Future of Christendom conference.

The event will take place at Spooky Nook Sports in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, and will run from Friday evening through all day Saturday,

with an invitation to the Sunday morning worship service of the Independence Reformed Bible Church.

This will be a weekend packed with practical teaching, with a theme of the Gospel at War in many areas of our culture, including

government schools, the Supreme Court, missions, feminism, and even the church pulpits.

Head to futureofchristendom .org.

James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here.

I'm very excited to announce that my longtime friend Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I

are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again for the G3 National Conference.

That's Thursday, September 21st through Saturday the 23rd, on a theme that I have been preaching, teaching,

writing about, and defending in live public debates for most of my life, the sovereignty of God.

I'll be joined on the speaking roster by Steve Lawson, Voti Baucom, Paul Washer, Virgil Walker, Scott

Anuel, and Josh Bice, founder of G3 Ministries.

And there's more great news.

Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio can get you a 30 discount off the registration

fee.

Go to g3min .org, that's g3min .org, and enter promo code

G3ISIR.

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Chris Arnzen and I look forward to seeing you all Thursday, September 21st through Saturday the 23rd at the G3

National Conference in Atlanta, Georgia on the sovereignty of God.

Make sure you stop by the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Exhibitor booth and say hi to Chris Arnzen while

you're there.

Go to g3min .org and enter promo code G3ISIR for your

30 discount off the registration fee.

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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio on the air.

Getting a driver's license, running a cash register, flipping burgers, passing sixth grade.

Do you know what they all have in common?

They all require training, assessments, and certifications.

But do you know what requires no training at all?

Becoming a parent.

My name is A .M. Brewster.

I'm the president of Truth, Love, Parent, and host of its award -winning podcast.

I've been a biblical family counselor since the early 2000s, and what I've discovered is that the majority of Christian parents have

never been biblically equipped to do the work of the ministry in their homes.

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We serve God by equipping dads and moms to be the ambassador parents God called and created them to be.

We produce free parenting resources, train church leaders, and offer biblical counseling so that the next generation of

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Make sure you mention Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

We're now back with A .M. Brewster and our discussion of practical discipleship.

Our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

If you have a question, give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

Do you have anything further to say before you want to move on with more

details on the third step, or do you want me to take a listener question?

There's one more thing I think it's important to say on the authority topic, and then, yeah, let's definitely take a question.

And this is something I talk a lot about with parents.

My son is 16, my daughter's 13, and they are both professing Christians.

They both, as far as I can tell, you know, I believe that they truly do know the Lord and are

growing in that.

Therefore, they have just as much responsibility to exercise their inherited authority

in my life as I do in theirs.

And sometimes I think we see, you know, it's important for everyone to have their Paul.

It's important for everyone to have their Barnabas.

It's important for everyone to have their Timothy.

And sometimes in discipleship, we break those down into age categories.

You know, Paul's older than I am.

Barnabas is my age, and Timothy's younger than I am.

And yes, definitely the older person should be wiser, should know more, but that is not always the case.

And we need to be very careful that we're humble enough to recognize that when somebody comes to me who's younger than I am, who doesn't have as

much experience as I am, but they're speaking God's truth, I have the responsibility to submit to

that.

It's not because I'm submitting to them and their inherent authority.

They don't have any in my life.

But because they are speaking God's truth and He has ultimate authority in my life.

So that's just a really important thing I wanted to throw out there, because we get this idea that,

you know, somebody younger than me can't disciple me, and that is 100 not true.

But yeah, I'd love to take a question.

Okay, great.

We have Bruce in Yapank, Long Island, New York.

And Bruce says, isn't the best form of discipleship that

we can have from the church that is not exclusively pastors, elders,

and deacons to the congregant, but also Christian friends with whom you spend most

of your time, perhaps, and are holding each other accountable when you are

fellowshipping?

Oh, Bruce, man, you nailed it.

You totally nailed it.

And you got to my next point on time, for sure.

But you also hit on the fact that this is not just a pastoral thing.

It's definitely, yeah, sure, it is a pastoral thing.

But I don't know about your pastor.

I know mine's finite.

Mine's human.

Mine only has so much time and can only interact with so many people at a time.

And the reality is that for too long in the Western Christian circles, we've had this

idea that it's the pastor's job to do all the stuff.

He runs all the committees.

He teaches all of the lessons.

He does all the counseling.

And that's not how it's supposed to be.

I referenced Ephesians 4 .15 before, a few verses before that.

We recognize that God gave us pastor -teachers for the equipping of the saints, that's us, the people in the pews,

to do the work of the ministry, the work of service, as the New American Standard says it,

to the building up of the body of Christ.

And what comes next is a detailed analysis of what that work of the ministry is.

It's the building up of the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity in faith and the knowledge of the Son of God as

we're becoming mature men and women to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.

No longer children tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by trickery of men, by craftiness and

deceitful scheming.

But speaking the truth in love, this is the method of this work of service we're supposed to be doing.

What is the end result?

We grow up in all aspects and to Him who is the head, even Christ.

And it goes on even more detail, comparing it to joints and the bones being connected.

We work, we're unified, we do the job that God's called us to do as we are doing this

work of the ministry in each other's lives.

That is discipleship.

The work of the ministry is, by definition, discipleship.

And Bruce, you said that so well.

I agree 100%.

Is there another question or should we transition to the next point?

You should transition because I want to wait before I ask a couple of these other questions.

Yeah, perfect.

Not a problem.

Okay, so I mentioned that Bruce's question had a little bit to do with time, and it does, and that's our

second point, time.

First of all, just an observation that I think we all know, but we all don't function as if it's true.

Again, I'm speaking a lot from the context of, you know, Western, modern

thought, okay?

So, this isn't going to be true in the case of everyone who's listening to this.

But I think as the world is growing and kind of maturing and they're

taking more and more on these ideas and these technologies and whatever else are allowing us to do more, the reality is we've created

a culture of busyness, which on one side is already super dangerous, but

couple that with the fact that we're poor time managers.

A culture of busyness, way too much to do, and yet we manage that time

very poorly.

We have just – we've made life so difficult for ourselves.

Our days are full of so many responsibilities, so many relationships, so many distractions, so much entertainment, so much

that we want to do and don't do.

But our days really aren't full of so much of discipleship.

It's like discipleship is that thing that we do when we get around to it.

Discipleship is that thing that we do maybe once a week or biweekly when we go to

that person's home on Sunday evening, right?

And why is it we're not doing it more?

Well, for a couple reasons.

One, because we don't understand exactly what discipleship is.

We don't understand that it can be going on all of the time.

But two, because oftentimes the idea is that there's just – there's quote -unquote more important things to be doing.

And by that, like I want to be fair.

We all understand discipleship is important, but like if I don't work my job, that's going to be a problem.

If I don't spend time with my kids, that's going to be a problem, right?

If I don't even have some entertainment in my life, I'll burn out or whatever.

And so we say, well, we need these things.

I've got to eat.

I've got to sleep.

I've got to work.

I've got to whatever.

And the discipleship, that picture of discipleship that we have in our heads gets kind of pushed off to the side because

in our minds it's not as important.

Lots of issues with that thinking.

But we do have to acknowledge the fact that we've created a society where we and I believe, honestly believe the

machinations of the devil himself have been a big part of how we've gotten to this point.

Keep us too busy to be living the life that God created us to live.

It's a huge problem.

So for these reasons – oh, go ahead, Chris.

No, go ahead.

Oh, okay.

So for these reasons and a lot more, we have this idea of discipleship, and this was definitely

the big idea as I was growing up.

My teens and early 20s, whatever else, discipleship was kind of just – it was a packaged curriculum.

It was a six -week Bible study where we meet for an hour, hour and a half maybe,

and then we talk about things.

We pray for each other and whatever else, and then we go on from there.

But that's not really the practice that we see in the scriptures.

What do we see in the scriptures?

Well, in Matthew 420, Mark 118, we see that the disciples left their nets and followed after

Jesus.

Aaron, are you telling me that I need to quit my job and follow after Jesus the way that the disciples did?

You know, my answer to that question is maybe.

The question is whether or not we'd be willing to do so if that's what it took.

As a biblical counselor, oftentimes when I'm working with families, I ask people, so what's your marriage worth to you?

What are your kids worth to you?

What are you willing to do?

Yeah, I know you think that you need to work 70 hours a week to support your family, but what if I proved to you that you didn't?

Would you be willing to change your job?

And it's amazing to me what people aren't willing to do.

And you know why they're not willing to do it is that, to be honest, it's not that important.

It's not as important as the thing that they're being asked to give up.

But we see people leaving their jobs to go live a different life because it's

the most Christ -honoring thing that they could do.

We see people in Acts 2, 42 through 46, continually devoting themselves to

teaching and fellowship, to breaking of bread.

This was a continual thing for the new baby church.

In the book of Acts, we see these people on a regular basis.

Now, some of them took it too far.

Some of them quit their jobs and they're waiting around on hilltops for Jesus to return.

Obviously, you can go a very bad direction with that.

But that's what we see, this picture of this continual interaction with each other.

We know from Matthew 5, 14 through 16 that there's never a time where it's appropriate to put our lights under a bushel.

It's impossible, truly, to hide a city set on a hill.

And yet, so, you know, we can't and I would say that broadly, yes, the salt and light

passages have a lot to do with evangelism.

That's true, and that's a whole other conversation that, if we're being honest with ourselves, the vast majority of us don't take

evangelism nearly as seriously as the Bible says that we need to.

But it also has a lot to do with this concept of discipleship, as I'm salt and light in another believer's life,

sharpening them.

And there are any number of commands and scriptures to leave all that we have, including our possessions, our families, our very

lives, that they are nothing compared to following Christ.

Luke 14, 33, Matthew 10, 37 through 39.

Again, a really powerful passage about this idea of what's really more important to me.

He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.

And he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

And he who does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me.

He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life will find it for my sake.

Now, so there's this reality in scripture that there has to be something more important,

and we get our priorities all messed up because we've created a world where there's so much that

distracts us in our lives.

But if you've been in the church for any amount of time, then you recognize that the word disciple really is

synonymous with student, okay?

Now, I found that it's really helpful in counseling and things like that to help people to

make comparisons between ideas.

In one concept, we understand it perfectly.

Like, we totally get it.

And in another, we're like, an identical concept doesn't make sense.

You know, when David was committing adultery with Bathsheba, he just really wasn't thinking about how wicked and

awful it was.

When he had her husband killed, he thought that was the best thing.

Well, then the prophet comes to him and says, there's this guy who stole the sheep, and David's incensed.

And then he said, well, David, you are that guy.

Praise God, David saw the metaphor for what it really was.

And I want us to take this metaphor, and I want us to see this.

Think about being a student.

If you took the amount of time that you dedicate to being a disciple, a follower of God,

and you apply that to any other discipline, academic, jobs, whatever the case may be,

sports, I think the vast majority of us would be very poor students indeed.

If we worked as hard on our soccer teams, in our martial arts,

in our pickleball, as we do to be a maturing Christian, we wouldn't be good at

those sports.

If we were graded in our discipleship the way we are graded

in our schooling, we wouldn't get very fantastic grades.

And why am I saying this?

Well, generally speaking, and of course this varies a lot from institution to institution, a three -credit course in a college,

taken over a full semester, demands about nine hours a week of in -class or out -of -class investment.

Therefore, a part -time student is taking six

credits, and a full -time student is taking at least 12.

Six credits, that's 18 hours a week.

Twelve credits, 36 hours a week.

And most of us recognize that our children, elementary school and high school, are oftentimes in school doing those

things for nearly eight hours a day.

And then they have hours of homework on top of that.

They are students.

And we say, well, of course they have to dedicate that amount of time.

Of course they've got to school to school.

They've got to sit and they've got to listen to the course.

They've got to do all of the homework.

They're students.

They're learning.

How are they going to get better if they're not?

From that perspective, of course we want our kids to go to school.

We want them to do well.

We want them to dedicate the time necessary.

And we encourage them to get to their practices and to practice their instruments and to work on their martial arts.

But discipleship, well, we're not nearly as passionate and dramatic

about that investment, are we?

How do I know that?

Well, how many services do we attend?

How long is the preaching of those services?

Yeah.

Hour and a half long service.

Great.

Thirty minutes of preaching.

Okay.

Once a week?

Twice a week?

Maybe three times a week?

All right.

How much time are you spending individually, personally in your Bibles?

Five minutes a day?

Ten minutes a day?

I skip a lot of days because my schedule.

You see where I'm going with it?

I know we see it.

And I know how touchy it is.

And I know how uncomfortable it is.

Again, as a biblical counselor, these are conversations I'm having with people all of the time.

It's like you say you want this.

You say you love the Lord, but you're not interacting with him at all.

And if I told you I loved my wife, but I never talked to her.

Every time she entered the room, I exited the room.

I didn't ever want to be around her.

I didn't ever want to talk to people about her.

You'd be like, Aaron, you don't love your wife.

And you would be right.

I don't love my wife.

When you love someone, you want to passionately spend as much time with them as you can.

Well, if being a disciple is being a student, are we good students of Jesus Christ?

And the answer is, for the most part, and I'm speaking of myself here too, we're not.

We don't have those expectations.

In fact, pick up right where you left off there when we return from our midway break.

Will do.

And those of you who are waiting, and hopefully you're waiting patiently.

But those of you who are waiting to have your questions asked and answered, we will get to as many of you as possible when

we return from the break.

And for those of you who want to get in line, send in your emails to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com gives us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.

This is a reminder, folks, please be patient with us, because the middle break is always a little longer than the other breaks in the

show.

Because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer

break in the middle of the show so that they can air their own public service announcements and other local

things in compliance with FCC mandates.

They have to geographically localize this program to Lake City, Florida, where they're located.

And while they do that, we simultaneously air our globally heard commercials.

Please use this time wisely.

Write down as much of the contact information for as many of our advertisers as you possibly can so that you can more

frequently and successfully respond to our advertisers.

We hope that will often mean you buy their products, use their services, and visit their churches.

But when you cannot do any of those things, please, I'm asking you, please, to at

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That will go a long way, because we absolutely, positively need our advertisers to exist.

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We'll be right back.

Don't go away.

The Mid -Atlantic Reformation Society presents The Future of Christendom 2023 The Gospel at

War September 15th to the 16th in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania featuring Dr. James

White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

We are excited to be including a formal debate in this year's conference.

Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries will be debating Dr. Gregory Coles, author of Single Gay Christian,

A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity.

The debate topic.

Is gay Christian a biblically acceptable identity for a member of Christ's Church?

So come join us for the 6th Future of Christendom Conference.

The event will take place at Spooky Nook Sports in Mannheim, Pennsylvania and will run from Friday evening through all day Saturday

with an invitation to the Sunday morning worship service of the Independence Reform Bible Church.

This will be a weekend packed with practical teaching with a theme of the Gospel at War in many areas of our culture including

government schools, the Supreme Court, missions, feminism and even the church pulpits.

Head to futureofchristendom .org.

James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here.

I'm very excited to announce that my long time friend Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I

are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again for the G3 National Conference that's Thursday, September

21st through Saturday the 23rd on a theme that I have been preaching, teaching, writing about and defending in live

public debates for most of my life, the sovereignty of God.

I'll be joined on the speaking roster by Steve Lawson, Voti Baucom, Paul Washer, Virgil Walker, Scott

Anuel and Josh Bice, founder of G3 Ministries.

And there's more great news, Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio can get you a 30 discount

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Go to g3min .org, that's g3min .org and enter promo

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Chris Arnzen, I look forward to seeing you all Thursday, September 21st through Saturday the 23rd at the G3

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Make sure you stop by the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Exhibitor booth and say hi to Chris Arnzen while

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Go to g3min .org and enter promo code G3ISIR for your

30 discount off the registration fee.

It's such a blessing to hear from Iron Sharpens Iron Radio listeners from all over the world.

Here's Joe Reilly, a listener in Ireland who wants you to know about a guest on the show

he really loves hearing interviewed, Dr. Joe Moorcraft.

I'm Joe Reilly, a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron Radio listener here in Atai in County Kildare, Ireland.

Going back to 2005, one of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is Dr. Joe

Moorcraft.

If you've been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Moorcraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming,

Georgia are largely to thank since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters.

Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming is in Forsyth County, a part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Heritage is a thoroughly biblical church, unwaveringly committed to Westminster standards and Dr. Joe

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If you visit, have them Joe O 'Reilly, Iron Sharpens Iron Radio listener, and Mattai in County Kildare, Ireland,

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If you love Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, one of the best ways you can help keep the show on the air is

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One such faithful advertiser who really believes in what Chris Hansen is doing is

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This is Pastor Bill Sousa, Grace Church at Franklin, here in the beautiful state of Tennessee.

Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support Iron Sharpens

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Grace Church at Franklin is an independent, autonomous body of believers that strives

to clearly declare the whole counsel of God as revealed in Scripture through the person and work

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And, of course, the end for which we strive is the glory of God.

If you live near Franklin, Tennessee, and Franklin is just south of Nashville, maybe 10 minutes,

or you are visiting this area, or you have friends and loved ones nearby, we

hope you will join us some Lord's Day in worshiping our God and Savior.

Please feel free to contact me if you have more questions about Grace Church at Franklin.

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This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our Sovereign

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always.

When Iron Sharpens Iron Radio first launched in 2005, the publishers of the New American

Standard Bible were among my very first sponsors.

It gives me joy knowing that many scholars and pastors in the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio audience have been

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Every day at thousands of community centers, high schools, middle schools, juvenile institutions,

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I'm the president of Truth Love Parent and host of its award -winning podcast.

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Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said,.

Give yourself unto reading.

The man who never reads will never be read.

He who never quotes will never be quoted.

He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains of his own.

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Thank you very much.

Before I return to my guest, A .M. Brewster, I have a couple of important announcements to make.

If you really love this show, folks, you look forward to it daily.

You look forward to the guests that I interview and the topics we address.

You look forward to winning free books and Bibles by submitting questions to our guests.

Well, please, if you really want us to stick around, we need your help financially.

Go to IronTripandZionRadio .com, click Support, then click Click to Donate Now.

You could donate instantly with a debit or credit card in that fashion.

If you prefer snail mail, mailing a physical check to a physical address from your local post office the old

-fashioned way, there will be a physical address as well that appears on your screen

where you can mail your checks, made payable to Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

If you want to advertise, whether it's your church, para -church ministry, your business, private practice like a

law firm, a medical firm, or maybe it's just a special event that you want to promote, whatever it is, as

long as it's compatible with what I believe, I would love to help you launch an ad campaign as quickly as possible because

we're just as much in urgent need of your advertising dollars as we are in your donations.

So send me an email to ChrisArnson at gmail .com and put advertising in the subject line.

Also, folks, I want to remind you I never want my listeners to give your own church where you're a member less money than you

normally give your church on the Lord's Day in order to bless us with a financial gift.

Never do that.

And if you are really struggling to survive and make ends meet, wait until you are back on your feet and more

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There are two things that are very clear non -negotiables in the Bible about our finances.

We are commanded to provide for our church and our family.

And providing for this radio show is obviously not a command.

But if you love the show and you don't want it to disappear and you are blessed financially above and beyond your

ability to provide for church and family, you have extra money collecting interest in the bank, and you have extra money for

benevolent, recreational, and trivial purposes, please share some of that money with us if you really want us to stick

around.

Go to ironsharpensironradio .com, click support, then click click to donate now.

I also want to remind you about the three -day conference that my dear friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha

Omega Ministries is involved in, September 15th through the 17th.

That's a Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

And it's being held in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, which is in Lancaster County.

The theme of the conference is The Gospel at War.

And on Saturday, September 16th, Dr. James White will be debating Dr. Gregory

Coles, who identifies as a gay Christian, on the theme, Is Gay Christian a Biblically Acceptable

Identity for a Member of Christ's Church?

That will be on Saturday, September 16th, 3 .30 p .m. to 6 .30 p .m.

That is a part of the conference.

I hope to see as many of you there as possible.

Go to futureofchristendom .org, futureofchristendom .org.

Also, I want to remind you about the conference that is coming up,

being sponsored and hosted by my friend Joe Jackowitz, founder of First Love

Ministries and First Love Radio.

First Love Radio is the ministry that livestreams this program.

And he and my friend Austin Huggins, a pastor in Baghdad, Florida,

are going to be hosting and speaking at the First Love Ministries Conference on

Life.

And the specific topic is sanctification, how to grow in holiness.

This will be Saturday and Sunday, August 26th and 27th.

And this is going to be held at the Reformed Baptist Church of Tama, Iowa.

If you want more details, go to firstloveministries .org, firstloveministries .org.

And finally, if you are not a member of a Christ -honoring, biblically faithful, theologically

sound, doctrinally solid church, no matter where you live on the planet Earth, I have lists of biblically

faithful churches spanning the globe, and I may be able to help you find a church, no matter where in the world you live,

as I have done with many listeners in the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio all over the planet Earth.

Sometimes I've helped folks all over the world find churches that are only a couple of minutes from where they live.

And that may be you, too.

Send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com and put I need a church in the subject line.

That's also the email address where you can send in a question to AM Brewster on practical discipleship,

chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.

Right before the break, Brother Aaron, you were saying that none of us could

ever claim without sinning and without lying that we have received

enough discipleship in our life.

We've basically arrived, and that is a part of our life that we can put behind us.

In fact, if anything is a clear evidence that you desperately and urgently need more

discipleship is if you ever arrive at that conclusion that you don't need

any more discipleship.

If you could just pick up where you left off there.

Yeah, really, being a disciple is a 24 -7, 365 calling.

You don't get to stop.

It's not something that you'll reach a plateau if that were a thing sometime in this life.

We don't get to set down our crosses, embrace ourselves, follow after our own devices.

We don't get to set aside any segment of our lives to be a student of self or a student of the world.

That's just something we can't do.

Discipleship is not something like a church, that class you have to take to become a member of a church.

That's not what it is.

Like, I took that class and I'm done.

It is a lifestyle.

It is your identity.

You are a disciple of God, and you will be a disciple of God.

And to be honest, you're going to be a disciple of God for all eternity.

Even after you have been glorified from your sin nature,

you still won't know everything there is to know about God because he is infinite.

And for all eternity, we get to learn more about him and deepen our understanding of him and

live differently because of it.

And that'll be a beautiful eternity to spend knowing more and more and more about our infinite God.

So, you will always be a disciple, and the idea that you're done is ridiculous.

And to Bruce's statement, I guess I hadn't made that final point about the great observation Bruce had made.

Yes, it is not just the pastor.

It's all of us in the church, but it's also that life -on -life daily stuff.

The reality about what I was saying about all of the busyness and distractions we have in our lives is that we are too busy to

do the stuff that we need to do the way we need to do it.

For thousands of years of human existence, this idea of life -on -life

togetherness was not only work, it was required, okay?

You had to do it to survive.

Well, because of technology and whatever the case is now and because of our concepts and our new worldviews,

we recognize, we think anyway that being a loner, being a maverick, working from my home office, never

interacting with people is somehow better, but it's not.

Jesus' disciples lived and breathed with him, and I have found from the experiences that I've had

in my own family, as well as in the various ministries that I've had, the more time you're spending with each

other, the more interaction you're having with each other, the better.

All the time and forever.

And what we need to do is we need to reevaluate.

We need to reevaluate how we're using our times.

We need to be more hospitable.

We have to get more people in our lives with greater consistency.

And I would actually say another thing, too, that we've been lied about in our culture is that, you know, we want to touch all of these people.

We want to have this influence on all of these people, but that influence is always more superficial.

You want to have deeper, more significant influence, you're going to have to do it with a smaller and smaller group of people.

We see that in Jesus' own life.

And so it would be better for us to really get in deep with a couple people where we're

really sharpening each other and growing together than it is to have a broad, very superficial relationship with

everybody in our church.

So, yeah, I mean, there's so much more I could say on all of these points.

This last point's also super important, but I know you've got some questions waiting in the wings, too.

Where do you want to go next?

Well, I'll take a quick question.

I don't know if the answer will be quick, but the question is quick.

They never are with me.

Trudy in Boca Raton, Florida, says, There have been

churches that I have been a part of that I believe far

exceeded their biblical roles in how to disciple their members

in getting too much involved in the personal lives of the families.

I would call it authoritarianism.

In fact, I think that something that they're trying to accomplish backfires

because this kind of over -intrusive dictatorship of a church

can actually emasculate the men in the home, where they have to ask permission constantly of their own

elders for everything that they do.

Would you agree that this is a danger?

I think that's an excellent question.

It's probably the minority problem in the church today, because most churches probably don't have any kind of

discipleship or discipline.

But I know that this kind of thing exists.

Thanks, God.

I've never been in a church that had this kind of dictatorship.

But unfortunately, being a Reformed Baptist, I have to be honest, this kind of thing has been known

to take place.

Probably not as much as it used to, but it has been something that has been known amongst

Reformed Baptists and authoritarian elders that have been in place in different

Reformed Baptist churches and so on.

But what are your thoughts on this?

Well, I'm going to tread lightly, because there's an assumption in this question.

And it's not necessarily a wrong assumption.

The assumption could be 100 % right.

There were no specifics given.

I was hoping that within the question there might be a clear specific, but there were just a lot of generalities.

And yes, I would agree that if a pastor

is legitimately dictating what your family eats,

then it gives your family a menu.

He's overstepping his bounds.

But if that same pastor is getting with the father and saying, listen, man, I get it,

McDonald's fries are addictive.

But you recognize that you're not being a good steward of your finances and you're not being a good steward of your family's health by eating McDonald's

every single day of the week with your family, because you and your wife just don't want to go

shopping and cook every now and then.

Of course, they've got to go to Burger King once in a while.

Arby's is my personal favorite.

But yeah, obviously, if you're spiritual, you eat at Arby's.

So should a pastor step into your house and go through your music collection and delete stuff off of your iTunes?

Well, no, that's not his place.

He doesn't have the inherent authority to do that.

He does have the inherited authority to say, hey, listen, man, I know what your kids are listening to, and I know the

types of things that you guys are listening to as a family.

I just want to encourage you that the stuff you're listening to is not making much of God.

In fact, it's doing the exact opposite.

And so when I've heard people ask questions like this, sometimes they've asked it because

it was truly a bad situation.

It was a dictatorial bad situation where the person was overstepping their bounds.

Sometimes, though, they talk like it's a dictatorial situation.

And then when I ask some more questions to find out, well, what types of things are being dictated to you?

It's just the pastor or the individual preaching God's word and saying, hey, you need to stop living this way.

That doesn't please the Lord.

I think that we're either A, not personal enough, or B, we're too personal.

And I'll tell you what, moderation is way harder than abstinence every single time.

Every single time.

It's way easier to be extreme than it is to be moderate.

And I think that the reality is we need to be more in each other's lives, but we

need to allow ourselves to be functioning on the inherited authority, speaking God's

words and God's truth and God's love as we're confronting people, which is, again, part of the

third thing that we're going to talk about.

Yes, and it could very well be that the listener is overreacting

or reacting in an unbiblical way to something that her or his

elders are requiring.

But it also could be a genuine abuse.

Oh, for sure.

Definitely.

I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt that it's probably right, but I wanted to see both sides of it.

Of course.

Like I said, I have been privy to people that I've known who are

reliable and people of integrity who are trustworthy, who have said

that there have been abusive elders that have nearly destroyed

marriages and homes and made eunuchs of the husbands because the husband had

to go run to the pastor for permission for everything and where they would go on

vacation and where they would move if they decided to.

That's a cult leader.

That's what that is.

Right.

Even if they happen to be believers in the 1689 London Baptist Confession.

True.

And there was I don't know what's going on with this cult today, but there was

a movement that was very big in the 80s, especially the International Church of

Christ, which sprang out of the average run of the mill

church of Christ that traced their roots back to the restoration movement in the 19th century with Alexander Campbell.

Well, this was a church of Christ group on steroids that even denied the salvation

of the ordinary churches of Christ.

And you had

to have a discipler

appointed to you and you were commanded to confess

every sin that you've committed either in deed or even in thought to this discipler, almost

like you're going to a confessional booth with a Roman Catholic priest.

And, you know, obviously, this is not a healthy or biblical level

of oversight that elders should have.

And and I just realized it was a woman was Trudy in Boca Raton asked about that.

Thank you, Trudy.

Thank you, Trudy.

Why don't you move on to your next point that you wanted to make?

Sure.

Yeah.

And to that authority thing.

Yeah.

If we're trying to function like an inherent authority and I get control of all your life

because I said so, that ends up being the thing that reveals the issue.

Whereas the inherited authority has got to find its root, its power, its everything in the

word.

And it's easy to twist the word.

I know that.

It's easy to use it as a bludgeon on people.

But that's the responsibility we have to all of us to know God's word well enough to speak it

to each other.

So, the first point was authority.

The second point was time.

We don't have enough time to get as personal as we should.

We need to make that time.

We've got to change our culture of our church and of our families in order to do that.

And this last point is the content.

What is the practical content of discipleship?

And I'm not going to give a discipleship course or curriculum.

I am going to stop here, though, and just encourage people to check out the Evermind app.

We do want to have resources there that are available to you.

So, all of the extra resources that can help spin off of today's conversation are

going to be available for free on the Evermind app.

Definitely check that out.

And a couple series that I've done, again, which are free, not selling anything, and really not intended to

be used in discipleship with another person, but is more so intended to help you better

understand what it is itself so that you can help do it better with other people and yourself.

That's what these things are for.

So, I have the Discipleship Spiral series is one specifically as it applies

to parenting.

I have the Biblical Parenting Essentials series, and I have a Biblical Parenting Essentials conference, which

there is a small $10 fee for that.

But these things are all designed to help you better understand these steps that we're about to talk

about for the content.

And this is all really going to come from 2 Timothy 3 .16, and we don't have the time to do a deep dive.

I'm going to go over it briefly, but I'm going to ask some really important questions, and I want you all to be honest with yourselves.

As we look at 2 Timothy 3 .16, we know the scriptures have been inspired by God and given to us for four things,

teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be perfect, the early first unto

all good works, right?

That is the goal, right?

We want to be discipled.

We want to be conformed to the image of Christ.

Discipleship, sanctification, this is all mixed together.

It's all the same thing.

And there are four really big important parts to this, and we're going to see that our discipleship has got to include all four

or it's failing.

And we're also going to see that most of our discipleship doesn't include all four.

The first one is teaching.

How much time do we, do you, invest in being taught from God's word?

This includes, first and foremost, personal study of the word.

Secondly, church attendance.

But then, yes, there are a ton of other additional resources, books and podcasts, sermons and things like that that can be valuable.

But other than our personal study of the word, how much of that teaching time is actually face -to

-face, individual -to -individual?

And as I go along here, you're going to see that the funnel is going to get narrower and narrower.

You're like, well, yeah, I go to church and I do read my Bible.

Hopefully you're doing that.

And you do listen to Christ Honoring music and things like that, and you are reading

books and whatever.

But the more specific we get in this, we're going to realize, man, we've got less and less of that involved in our lives than we

thought.

And that's good.

We need to see that we're not engaging with these steps as much as we should, and then we need to pursue them.

How much of that teaching is really face -to -face and individual -to -individual?

Well, in our day and age, most of it is very virtual, which means like even right now, I'm not talking to you

specifically about your needs.

I'm talking generally about truths that we all need.

And that's good to a point.

But if most of our teaching is generalized teaching, we are going to find that

we are going to be really in trouble when it comes to making those personal decisions that we have to make on a day -to -day basis.

So, how much of it is personalized for you?

How much of it covers the entire gamut of real educational excellence?

Because education is anytime we're learning anything, there's the learning, there's the understanding, and there's the applying that

needs to happen.

And a lot of our teaching doesn't do that.

I talk a lot about this on our Truth Love Parent podcast and in the Discipleship Spiral series that I mentioned earlier.

It's not good enough to know something.

You have to understand it, but it's not good enough to learn it and to understand it if you're not actually going to use it and apply it.

And we talk a lot about application.

We're going to talk more about that in a minute.

So, that's the first part.

That's the teaching.

And to be honest, this category of discipleship is the one in which we tend to invest most of our time.

However, that's not always the case.

Again, as a biblical counselor, I work with a lot of people who are going through a lot of difficulties, and the natural human reaction is that

whether things are going really well or things are going really difficult, we run from God.

We get so overwhelmed because our lives are so busy that we're not engaging as we should.

So, I hope we recognize, though, that even if we are, we do have regular involvement in God's Word,

it's not really that much.

It's a lot, sure, compared to other people, but is it really I mean, are we students of

God or are we just taste testing here and there?

The second point from 2 Timothy 3 .16 is reproving.

How many people be honest about this question how many people in your life are there that will actually

stand in front of you with an open Bible and tell you that you are wrong?

How many?

How many people in your life do that?

Listen, you're not fooling anybody.

You're a sinner.

I'm a sinner.

I sin every single day.

You do too.

There's not a single 24 -hour period that goes by that you don't sin at least once.

But do you have people in your life who will love you enough and know God's Word enough that they're saying, hey, this sin that you're doing,

that needs to stop.

Let me help you.

How much time do we invest in discovering our immaturities, our sins, our faults, our iniquities, and our transgression?

How much time do we invest in asking people to confront and support us in our spiritual weakness?

You know, we talked about the book of Acts, how these new Christians were spending all of this time dedicating themselves to the

teaching and fellowshipping, right?

The very first New Testament book likely that was written was the book of James.

The book of James is filled with teaching necessary to the foundational concepts of what it means to be a Christian.

In James chapter 5, we see two really important concepts.

We see somebody who's weak, who's struggling doing what?

Inviting the elders into their life, calling on them, help me, I'm struggling.

And yes, they are confessing their sins one to another.

So, that's obviously not going back to what Chris was saying, the bad version of that.

But there is this confession, I'm being honest with you about how I'm struggling so that you can speak truth into my life.

And then the very last verses of James chapter 5 talks about a person turning

somebody from the error of their way.

So, if the person is asking for help, we're giving help.

If they're not asking for help, we're still there.

And how many people do you have in your life who are doing that?

Who you guys are being honest about the genuine, real -life sins that are in your life and

that need to not be in your life?

So, on the whole, very few Christians have discipleship relationships where they are regularly challenged about the sins in

their lives.

In the average discipleship group, there's a lot of encouraging and there's a lot of edifying

and validating and affirming, but there's very little rebuke, admonishment, confrontation, and reproof.

In part because oftentimes our relationships are very superficial.

We don't know each other that well because we don't spend enough time with each other.

But also in part because we're afraid to do it or we've been told that that's not allowed.

So, we're superficial, we're dishonest in our relationships, we're not being honest about our struggles, we're

afraid in our relationships of what would happen if I actually told you that you need to stop sinning.

And this happens because we don't understand this first point about authority, about God's expectations for

one anothering and how one anothering includes rebuking and reproving and admonishing.

And to be honest, very few discipleship relationships encourage and expect reproof.

And this is why I tell people they need to give their fellow disciples, quote -unquote,

permission.

Listen, you don't need my permission, Chris, to reprove me, right?

You've got God's inherited authority to do that.

But I find that it's really helpful to encourage our fellow disciples and disciples to say to them, listen, I want you to know, I

want you to feel free and comfortable to do this in my life.

I need it.

I'm a sinner, I lie to myself, and I need someone like you to come into my life, speaking God's truth into my life so that I can

help overcome this stuff.

So, do you have reproof in your life?

Are you inviting people to have that type of a relationship with you?

My friends, we need it.

This is practical discipleship.

Two more points.

The next one is correcting.

This is the idea of, you know, a boat going out to sea, getting stuck in a storm, and

what does it have to do?

It needs to turn around and go back to port.

That is the correction.

I'm going the wrong direction, I need to stop, and I need to go the other direction.

So, how many people in your life are there not only to tell you what's right and to confront

you when you're wrong, but are also there to help you stop doing wrong and start doing

right?

See, we're all very opinionated in saying, hey, this is what you should do and this is what you shouldn't do.

Those are relatively easy things to say, and we do it all the time.

Social media is filled with that, media is filled with that, government is filled with that.

But what about the specifics?

I use this example a lot.

You know, youth pastors are great.

Tell the kids that they need to love God.

That's awesome.

But what does loving God look like for Trudy when she is

in school and she's being bullied in the bathroom?

What does loving God look like for Adrian whose parents are absolute jerks

and whose brothers are so unkind to him?

What does that look like for them practically?

This is the correction stage.

This is where we need to know people's struggles and we need to know God's word and we need to be able to help them take the practical

necessary steps to change these things.

So, how much effort is put into your life for you to formulate plans to

stop sinning and repent?

How many people in our lives keep us accountable to real change?

Because this, like I said, is basically the bread and butter of biblical counseling.

Once a biblical counselor has helped a counselee see their sin and their need for righteousness, so much of our time is put into helping them

specifically develop daily, weekly, and monthly plans that they need to really change and to see that genuine

repentance in their lives.

But think about it.

When we use the word, like, counseling, right?

Most of the people in the church, we see that as something that we only need when we've really gotten into a ton of trouble that we can't get ourselves out of.

We've worked, we've failed.

We've worked, we've failed.

We've worked, we've failed.

We find, like, oh, I can't do this.

I need help.

And we run to a counselor.

But the reality is that we all need this all of the time.

My friends, you can't do it on your own, ever.

Bare minimum, you need the Holy Spirit and the Bible.

But I found that the people who make course corrections in their lives through the

power of the Holy Spirit and by using the scriptures are the ones who are most interested in having others of God's people join the

process.

And then those who aren't interested in inviting God's people into the process are oftentimes the ones who are really not searching the scriptures and

leaning on the power of the Holy Spirit for personal change anyway.

So, most of our discipleship is spent teaching.

And I know I'm going through this super fast.

I break this stuff down in a lot more detail in some of those series that I've discussed.

So, get the Evermind app, start building your knowledge of these things.

But most of our discipleship is spent teaching.

Very little reproof oftentimes is being done in our lives in these relationships.

And even less correction is being done.

By the way, just one side point.

I don't have time to talk about it now.

But really, the understanding of what true application is, to take God's truth and to apply it

specifically with intense consistency is absolutely necessary in the correction state.

And if we're just kind of like, oh, this is how you should live your life, that's not real good correction.

And then the last point, and we can take questions and we can build this up more as we have time, is the training one.

And just a couple thoughts here.

It doesn't really matter what academic endeavor you pursue, what physical feats you're able to accomplish.

If you don't continue training and growing, and at least working hard to maybe maintain your

standard of achievement, you're going to slide.

You're going to deteriorate.

You're going to fall back.

Everybody, whether he's a mechanic or an Olympian or a college professor, when they stop

using it, they lose it.

An old German teacher of mine, he doesn't speak German as often as he used to speak German when he was

teaching it all the time, because he has a different job now in the university.

And he admitted to me that his German isn't as good as it used to be.

Olympic athletes, when they stop training for the Olympics, they put on the extra unnecessary weights.

They just can't do the things they used to do.

And that's not just like decades later when they've gotten older.

Sometimes it's just a few years when they're done training.

It's going to happen, and it happens in our spiritual lives too.

So the question is, how many people do you have in your life who are right now helping you to continue training in the spiritual

disciplines that you're not perfect at and won't ever be perfect until we see God?

With whom are you working to sharpen your righteousness, keep an edge on your maturity, and hone your Christ -likeness?

Too many Christians have a one -and -done mindset.

They did a thing, they checked it off their list, they moved on to something else.

Others are okay with this idea of plateauing in their walk with God.

Of course, we know it's not really possible to plateau, because if you're not drawing near to God, you will slip further from Him.

And once again, this modern Western mindset, at least when it comes to spiritual growth, is that we can maintain

sanctification on our own.

Sure, we might need help to learn new things, we might need occasional reproof if we really, quote -unquote, fall off the wagon, and it

can be helpful for somebody else to give us advice if we really can't figure it out for ourselves.

But once we have the information, once we're kind of in a groove, we really don't think we need someone to continue reminding us and

helping us and keeping us accountable to continue in the things we've learned.

And we think that way because we're delusional, and we don't understand exactly how badly we need this constant

reminder and training in our lives.

Okay, we have to go to our final break.

So those are the three things.

We have to go to our final break right now.

Don't go away, we'll be right back with A .M. Brewster.

The Mid -Atlantic Reformation Society presents The Future of Christendom 2023, The Gospel at War,

September 15th to the 16th in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, featuring Dr. James White of Alpha and

Omega Ministries.

We are excited to be including a formal debate in this year's conference.

Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries will be debating Dr. Gregory Coles, author of Single Gay Christian,

A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity, the debate topic, Is Gay Christian a Biblically

Acceptable Identity for a Member of Christ's Church?

So come join us for the sixth Future of Christendom conference.

The event will take place at Spooky Nook Sports in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, and will run from Friday evening through all day Saturday,

with an invitation to the Sunday morning worship service of the Independence Reformed Bible Church.

This will be a weekend packed with practical teaching, with a theme of the Gospel at War in many areas of our culture, including

government schools, the Supreme Court, missions, feminism, and even the church pulpits.

Head to futureofchristendom .org.

James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here.

I'm very excited to announce that my longtime friend, Chris Arnson of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I

are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again for the G3 National Conference.

That's Thursday, September 21st through Saturday the 23rd, on a theme that I have been preaching, teaching,

writing about, and defending in live public debates for most of my life, the sovereignty of God.

I'll be joined on the speaking roster by Steve Lawson, Voti Baucom, Paul Washer, Virgil Walker, Scott

Anuel, and Josh Bice, founder of G3 Ministries.

And there's more great news.

Chris Arnson of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio can get you a 30 discount off the registration

fee.

Go to g3min .org, that's g3min .org, and enter promo

code G3ISIR.

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Chris Arnson and I look forward to seeing you all Thursday, September 21st through Saturday the 23rd, at the G3

National Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on the sovereignty of God.

Make sure you stop by the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Exhibitor booth and say hi to Chris Arnson while

you're there.

Go to g3min .org and enter promo code G3ISIR for

your 30 discount off the registration fee.

I'm Brian McLaughlin, president of the SecureComm Group, and an enthusiastic supporter of Chris Arnson's

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio program.

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This is Brian McLaughlin of the SecureComm Group joining Chris Armstrong's family of advertisers to keep

Iron Sharpens Iron radio on the air.

Puritan Reformed is a Bible -believing, kingdom -building, devil -fighting church.

We are devoted to upholding the apostolic doctrine and practice preserved in Scripture alone.

Puritan Reformed teaches men to rule and lead as image -bearing prophets, priests, and

kings.

We teach families to worship together as families.

Puritan is committed to teaching the whole counsel of God so that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of

God as the waters cover the sea.

We sing the Psalms, teach the law, proclaim the gospel, make disciples, maintain discipline, and exalt

Christ.

This is Pastor David Reese of Puritan Reformed in Phoenix, Arizona.

Join us in the glorious cause of advancing Christ's crown and covenant over the

kings of the earth.

Puritan Reformed Church.

Believe.

Build.

Fight.

PuritanPHX .com.

I'm Dr.

Joseph Piper, President Emeritus and Professor of Systematic and Applied Theology at

Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Every Christian who's serious about the Reformed faith and the Westminster Standards should have and use

the eight -volume commentary on the theology and ethics of the Westminster Larger Catechism titled

Authentic Christianity by Dr. Joseph Morecraft.

It is much more than an exposition of the Larger Catechism.

It is a thoroughly researched work that utilizes biblical exegesis as well as historical and

systematic theology.

Dr. Morecraft is pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, and I urge everyone looking

for a biblically faithful church in that area to visit that fine congregation.

For details on the eight -volume commentary, go to westminstercommentary .com

westminstercommentary .com.

For details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, visit

heritagepresbyterianchurch .com heritagepresbyterianchurch .com.

Please tell Dr. Morecraft and the saints at Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia that Dr. Joseph

Piper of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary sends you.

When Iron Sharpens Iron Radio first launched in 2005, the publishers of the New American

Standard Bible were among my very first sponsors.

It gives me joy knowing that many scholars and pastors in the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio

audience have been sticking with or switching to the NASB.

This is Darrell Bernard Harrison, co -host of the Just Thinking Podcast, and the NASB is

my Bible of choice.

I'm Pastor Tom Buck at First Baptist Church in Lindale, Texas, and the NASB

is my Bible of choice.

I'm Pastor Kent Keller of Faith Bible Church in Sharpsburg, Georgia, and the NASB is my Bible of

choice.

I'm Andrew Rapport, the founder and executive director at Striving for Eternity Ministries, and

the NASB is my Bible of choice.

I'm Mark Rimaldi, pastor of Sovereign Grace Church of Greenbrier, Tennessee, and the NASB

is my Bible of choice.

I'm Christopher Cookston, pastor of Prineville Community Church in Prineville, Oregon,

and the NASB is my Bible of choice.

I'm Matt Tarr, pastor of High Point Baptist Church in Larksville, Pennsylvania, and the NASB is my Bible of choice.

Here's a great way for your church to help keep Iron Sharpens Iron Radio on the air.

Pastors, are your pew Bibles tattered and falling apart?

Consider restocking your pews with the NASB, and tell the publishers you heard about them

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Go to nasbible .com.

That's nasbible .com to place your order.

Hello, my name is Anthony Uvino, and I'm one of the pastors at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Corn, New York, and

also the host of the reformrookie .com website.

I want you to know that if you enjoy listening to the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio show like I do, you can now find it on the

Apple's iTunes app by typing Iron Sharpens Iron Radio in the search bar.

You no longer have to worry about missing a show or a special guest because you're in your car or still at work.

Just subscribe on the iTunes app and listen to the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio show at any time, day or night.

Please be sure to also give it a good review and pass it along to anyone who would benefit from the teaching and the many

solidly Reformed guests that Chris Arnzen has on the show.

Truth is so hard to come by these days, so don't waste your time with fluff or fake news.

Subscribe to the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio podcast right now.

And while you're at it, you can also sign up for the reformrookie .com podcast and visit our website and the YouTube

page.

We are dedicated to teaching Christian theology from a Reformed Baptist perspective to beginners in the faith as

well as seasoned believers.

From Keech's Catechism and the Doctrines of Grace to the Olivet Discourse and the Book of Leviticus, the Reform

Rookie podcast and YouTube channel is sure to have something to offer everyone seeking Biblical truth.

And finally, if you're looking to worship in a Reformed church that holds to the 1689 London Baptist Confession

of Faith, please join us at Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Corham, New York.

Again, I'm Pastor Anthony Ovinio and thanks for listening.

If you love Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, one of the best ways you can help keep the show on the air is

by supporting our advertisers.

One such faithful advertiser who really believes in what Chris Hansen is doing is

Daniel P. Patafuoco, serious injury lawyer and Christian apologist.

Dan is the president and founder of the Historical Bible Society.

Their mission?

To foster belief in the credibility of Scripture as the written Word of God.

They go to various churches, schools and institutions to publicly display a rare

collection of Biblical texts along with a fascinating presentation by Mr. Patafuoco

demonstrating the reliability of Scripture.

To advance the cause of the Gospel, they created a beautiful, perfect facsimile of the

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Visit historicalbiblesociety .org.

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Thanks for helping to keep Iron Sharpens Iron Radio on the air.

As host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, I frequently get requests from listeners for church recommendations.

A church I've been strongly recommending as far back as the 1980s is Grace Covenant Baptist Church in

Flemington, New Jersey, pastored by Alan Dunn.

Grace Covenant Baptist Church believes it's God's prerogative to determine how he shall be worshipped and how he

shall be represented in the world.

They believe churches need to turn to the Bible to discover what to include in worship and how to worship

God in spirit and truth.

Grace Covenant Baptist Church endeavors to maintain a God -centered focus.

Reading, preaching, and hearing the Word of God, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs,

baptism, and communion are the scriptural elements of their corporate worship, performed with faith, joy,

and sobriety.

Discover more about Grace Covenant Baptist Church in Flemington, New Jersey at

gcbcnj .squarespace .com.

That's gcbcnj .squarespace .com.

Or call them at 908 -996 -7654.

That's 908 -996 -7654.

Tell Pastor Dunn that you heard about Grace Covenant Baptist Church on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

And please make note of this update on Grace Covenant Baptist Church of

Flemington, New Jersey's website.

Their new website is gcbc -nj .org.

Gcbc -nj .org.

So disregard the website that you just heard in the commercial.

We're now back with A .M. Brewster, and we have a listener in New Rochelle, New

York.

Corny, and that is either a nickname for Cornelius, or our listener has very cruel parents.

One or the other.

Ouch.

Well, Corny—.

It could also be Cornelia.

It could be Cornelia.

Who knows?

Yeah, you're right.

Corny asks, Have you written a book on this subject, or can you recommend books about

discipleship?

Great question.

I have not written a book.

I have done a lot of work on it.

Again, the Discipleship Spiral series, which is a podcast series, it also can be read

on the blog, is something that I put work into.

I did reference two books in the additional resources that I provide on the app

to support what we've been talking about.

A lot of those resources come from the Association of Certified Biblical

Counselors, and there were two books that they had talked about.

One of them is in a parenting context, The Disciple -Making Parent.

They did a review on that, and I have a link to that on the app.

And then also a book called The Trellis and the Vine that speaks to this as well.

So, no doubt there are a lot of other good books out there not coming to the top of my head, but hopefully some of those can be a blessing to

you and have a lot of podcast episodes about discipleship on the celebration of God.

Well, I've got a couple of recommendations.

Donald Whitney wrote a book that is now considered a classic by many, Spiritual

Disciplines for the Christian Life.

It is published by NAV Press, and you can get that from CVBBS

.com, one of our sponsors, CVBBS .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

And Solid Ground Christian Books, another one of our very prominent sponsors, has brought back

into print, and maybe the first time that this book has ever been brought back into print since it was originally published,

Counsels and Thoughts for the Spiritual Life of Believers by Thomas More.

Thomas More, not the Roman Catholic martyr, but Thomas More, who was an elder

along with Charles Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, England in the 19th

century.

This is an extraordinary book and you can get that from Solid -Ground -Books

.com.

And also, there is a book that Solid Ground Christian

Books carries.

I don't believe that they published it, but they sell it.

Life in Christ by Jeremy Walker, a really wonderful brother in Christ who just preached at the

church where I'm a member recently.

He pastors a church of his own in England.

And Life in Christ, Becoming and Being a Disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So those are my recommendations.

And I'd like you now to summarize in about a minute's time what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our

listeners today, Brother Aaron.

Discipleship is an absolute necessity because discipleship is necessary for

sanctification.

And when we recognize the authority of God and the inherited authority of the other believers in our lives and the

part that they need to play in this process, and when we make the time to

know people, to give people permission to be part of our lives,

and then when we're focused on the right content of knowing God's truth, knowing what is right, what pleases Him, and living

accordingly, and when we don't, recognizing that it's a sin, allowing people to confront us,

to be thankful for that, to embrace those opportunities to change

in humility, and then really grappling with the correction phase.

How do I make this change in my life?

How do I fight these temptations?

What do I need to do to see temptation afar off and hide myself from it?

How do I overcome where I have failed all of this time and working together with others to do so?

And then recognizing that we'll never have made it, but continually exercising the

training, then we will be disciples that are glorifying God and growing.

Amen, and we're out of time.

And don't forget about the website for Aaron Brewster, evermindministries .com.

Evermindministries .com.

I look forward to your interview next week on Monday, the 21st of

August.

I want to thank everybody who listened, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

Savior than you are a sinner.