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.

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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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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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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.