1 - The Importance of Discipleship

Well, welcome to what is the first class in the

School of Discipleship. This is the first of what hopefully will be many classes, but it is the first class where we will be discussing today in this lesson the importance of discipleship.

So we welcome you to this. We're going to be discussing why it's important to disciple.

We're going to be discussing going through a book that we have for you, which is called Growing in Grace.

It is a product that we have here at Striving for Eternity. You can order them if you don't have one.

If you're an enrolled member of the academy, you can enroll at the website down there. You will have one already if you have paid for the year.

If not, you can always go to the store and purchase one at the store. They're only a couple of dollars with shipping.

I think maybe seven or eight, maybe nine dollars with shipping and we can get one out to you.

These are going to be helpful for you to go and teach others.

What we're going to try to do is this. We're going to today talk about the importance of discipleship and why you as a

Christian should be making disciples. Then we're going to take several classes and we're going to go through the book

Growing in Grace. What we're going to do is actually I'm going to teach you how to use this book while teaching how to disciple.

The reason is because we want you to order some of these books for your church, your small group, your children, your home school, whatever it is, and disciple people.

Start making it a habit of discipling others. That's what our goal is going to be. That's what we're going to look to do in the next several weeks.

This class will probably take about maybe I think ten to twelve weeks, about three months which is about what it takes to go through.

We're going to hopefully encourage you to be a disciple maker. In this school of discipleship, we're going to start with an overview of discipleship.

What I want to do to start is to ask you guys this. We're going to look into several passages of Scripture.

I want to ask you to think about this. What is the Great Commission?

Now I'm asking you to think about that because of this. Do you realize that the majority of people that are on the radio or preach in churches get this one wrong?

So it's sort of like a trick question shall we say. Because people have heard what the

Great Commission is so often that they take it for granted what the Great Commission is.

When I often ask people, in one word or two words what would you say the

Great Commission is? And people will say the Great Commission is to go or to go everywhere or to evangelize.

Most often the answer is to go. If I say what is the Great Commission, people say to go.

To go into all the world. And that is what is often stated is the

Great Commission. Now why do they say that? Well they base it on a text. What text?

Let's look at that. Matthew 28 verses 19 and 20 and let's see what it says here. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the

Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you and behold

I am with you always to the end of the age. Now this is the

Great Commission. This is the last words of Jesus Christ just before he leaves the earth.

Last words are important. I was explaining the importance of last words to a small group just like last weekend.

And what we had talked about was the fact that it reminds me when I think about last words, there's people that talk about last words of famous people.

But I'm always thinking of the last words of the poor man in the hospital when the pastor came to visit him.

See there's a pastor comes in to visit this man and he was on a respirator and the pastor comes in and kind of leans in and says, you know

Tom is there anything that I could do for you? And Tom's like suddenly gasping for air and he makes the signs for pen and paper.

And so quickly his wife hands him a pen and paper and he scribbles a note to the pastor and he hands it to the pastor and all of a sudden he goes limp.

And the machines just go buzzzzzzzzz and they give the signs that he's dead.

And nurses come rushing in and they push the pastor away and they start trying to revive the man. They can't revive the man.

The pastor in all the commotion takes the note and sticks it in his pocket and is all concerned about this man.

He just watched the man die in front of him. He's at the funeral and he was recounting that and he said, you know,

I actually saw him write his last words.

I just realized I have the same jacket. I didn't realize he pulls the paper out of his jacket and says,

I actually have Tom's last words right here in my hand. I didn't even look at them.

I forgot about them until just now. I'm going to read to you what Tom's last words were. He opens up the note and says, get off the oxygen tube.

Last words can be really important and they're also important to read. And what we just read is the last words of Jesus Christ in a sense while he was on the earth.

Now they weren't really his last words because, well, he's the word of God. He kept writing and he wrote all the way until the book of Revelation.

But when he was in the presence of his disciples, these were his last words to them that they could see him in physical form.

And so they see him and this is his parting words to them.

Now why is that important? Because this is something he wanted to leave for us.

This is what we call the Great Commission. This is what we as Christians are to be about the business of doing.

That makes it something important. And I'm going to deliver for you in explaining the importance of discipleship a message that I did many years ago at a missions conference.

And I didn't realize that it was one of these missions conferences where there was a pastor that had been retired in the area and he started off the missions conference on one

Sunday and it was my job to end the missions conference the following Sunday. And they had different speakers all week long.

The one pastor preached out of, well, this text. I preached out of, well, this text.

And what this pastor did was he focused on the going. That we as part of the

Great Commission is to go into all the world. We're supposed to send missionaries and if we're not going to be a missionary, we should pay for missionaries.

And so that's what ended up happening in that message. And I got up and I said, let's look at the text.

Now I'm going to, let's put the text back up if we can. And if we look at this, I want to go through a little bit of a

Greek lesson for you here. Because the word to go that you see there is actually in the

Greek is what's called an aris passive tense.

In other words, passive means that it's done to the individual. The aris tense means that this should be more of an adverb.

So this would be something that properly translated should say going.

Not go therefore, but going. Therefore this is really not emphasizing the word go.

Because the go is not the actual command. Now, in the

Greek we have different types of verbs.

We have arists and we have imperatives. An imperative is a command.

Well, do we have a command in this passage? Well, actually we happen to have a command.

And it is the word make that in the Greek, the word make is an active imperative.

It too is arist, but it is active and it is the imperative.

In other words, what that is saying is that you and I should be about the business of making.

And if you know how to break down a good sentence, you know that there's two things to do. You want to get to breaking down a sentence, you want to have your noun, your verb, and your complete thought.

Well, we now have the verb. It's to make. What is the subject? Well, let's put it up again then and see.

The subject is make who? Disciples.

Make disciples. So, the subject is disciples. So, we should be about the business of doing, if make is the imperative in this, and that's the command, then we should be going make disciples.

That's actually how to properly translate that. I think a better translation would be going make disciples or as you go make disciples.

Therefore, when people argue that the Great Commission is to go, as happened to me at this missions conference, we're not interpreting the passage properly because that's not the command.

So, what we end up with is this, we end up realizing that unfortunately many people teach this incorrectly.

And this pastor, after I got done at the missions conference, this retired pastor came up to me and says, you know what,

I preached that same message, that same text last Sunday to start the conference, and he said my whole focus was on world missions.

My topic was local missions. His was world missions. He said, I was focusing on the going into all the world.

And he said, you know what, after 30 years of pastoring, do you know I never once looked at the

Greek to see what the verbs were in that passage, to realize that the go is not an imperative?

He said, you just taught me something. Now when he first told me that he preached the same text,

I got really nervous, especially when he told me because I knew his topic was world missions.

So I got really nervous having not heard his sermon, which is probably a good thing because if I heard his sermon, I might have been a little bit more intimidated in preaching that message because I looked up to this man.

But he had humility and he ended up saying, you know what, he just took it for granted as he told me because so many people just take that passage and they assume because so many people say that the

Great Commission is to go, or some people look at Matthew 16 -15 and say it's to evangelize or to preach the gospel.

And they focus on that as the Great Commission and yet that's not the Great Commission. Now in this passage it's not the

Great Commission because the Great Commission is to make disciples from this passage. It's not into going into the world.

What about Mark 16? Well Mark 16 we don't find in some of the earliest manuscripts.

So there's very good evidence to say that most of Mark 16 was not in the original

Bible. The idea being is that it was something that was added in later by later writers, by people that were making copies.

And so we wouldn't want to build a doctrine on something that though it may be true it probably wasn't in the original.

In other words it is true that we should be going into all the world and preaching the gospel but we're not really sure that that, the preaching of the gospel, is the

Great Commission. In fact if we look at this verse, and we're going to break this verse down, let's put it up again.

We are to be going or as we go, now the as we go or going talks about how we carry out our day.

So we should be going and carrying out this making of disciples.

And he gives us a couple of other verbs here to tell us how to do that. Now look at verse 20, it says teaching, that's one verb, and the other verbs in 19 is baptizing.

So what we see here is to make disciples we should be baptizing them and teaching them.

Now this may rub the feathers maybe of your pastor, especially if you're

Presbyterian, they're probably really going to ruffle their feathers. But I actually believe according to that text that we should be about the business of making disciples.

Those disciples we make we should be baptizing them and teaching them, not our pastor.

Alright, so basically what that means is this, the first step of making a disciple is what?

If I'm talking to someone that does not know Christ, what is the first thing I need to do before I can baptize them and teach them everything that Christ has taught me?

That's right, I need to share the gospel. So I actually believe that the gospel is part of making a disciple.

It's actually the first part because you can't truly disciple someone until they're first a believer.

Now the word disciple is, in our day and age, in our vernacular, it would be like making a

Xerox copy. It's to replicate yourself in someone else.

And so what they would do typically at that time is, if you remember the disciples of Jesus Christ, they went around and with Jesus, they lived with Him.

And you learn a lot when you live with somebody. Many of you know in your own families, you've lived with your family, you've lived with people and you know those people really well.

Sometimes you wish you didn't know them so well, but you know them well when you live with them and you're doing everything together.

And that is what discipling was. When you became someone's disciple, you lived with them, you did everything with them, you basically ate with them and slept together and walked together and went from town to town together.

Everything. It wasn't just you came for classes. The importance of that there is that that is to show that when we see this, we're seeing that Christ tried to reproduce

Himself, which was the common pattern in the Greek culture of that time.

That is how a Greek teacher would do things. And so we are to be replicating ourselves in other people.

We are to find other people who know less information than we know and we are to be reproducing ourselves in them.

And so the way to do that is to basically try to spend a lot of time with somebody and explain to them everything

Christ is teaching you. Now, if they don't know Christ, the first step is the gospel.

I think that's why it starts by saying make disciples baptizing. See, baptism in the first century has a different connotation than it does in America today.

Actually, it has a similar connotation that it does in maybe the Middle East, where when someone gets baptized, it's basically kind of threatening them.

And so what you have is you have a case where you would have someone that gets baptized say in the

Middle East right now, if they're a Muslim, and they get baptized publicly. Anyone who publicly sees that baptism, in a

Muslim country, it's illegal to convert from Islam to anything else. And it's punishable by death.

So a public baptism is like basically saying you can kill me now.

In the first century, what they'd have is Jewish funerals. They'd actually bury an empty box.

And what they would do in that is bury a casket and say you are dead to the family.

Now, why is that important? Well, you lived with the family. You ate with the family.

You worked with the family. You got your livelihood through the family. If the family is no longer talking to you, and you're talking in a time when people never traveled more than like a mile from their home.

So everybody in the village knew one another. If they went out and had a funeral for you, nobody was going to talk to you.

They ignored you. Nobody paid you. No one gave you food. You were dead to the family, to the village, to everyone.

That's what they would do. That's a different connotation of baptism than we have today. And it's because of that that baptism was not something people did lightly.

People didn't get baptized unless they were really willing to follow after Christ. And that's why baptism had such a major importance in that time.

So I think the idea of Christ saying to them, baptize them. It's basically saying, lead them to Christ.

Lead them through the gospel. You then baptize them. That's the first step of obedience. Once they're baptized, start the teaching process.

Reproduce yourself in others. That is what discipleship is all about.

So we should be going. As we live our life, when you go to the store, make disciples.

If you're with a believer, it's an opportunity to share and to teach. I used to disciple one young man lifting weights.

He would come over to the house three days a week. We would lift weights together. And in lifting weights, we would start to talk about the things of God in between sets.

And it was a time of discipling. We would talk about the sermon that was preached that past Sunday.

Or what was discussed at Wednesday night prayer meeting. And we would discuss those things.

And it was a time of discipleship, not just weight lifting. You're in the car with your children.

Maybe turn the radio off. Use it as a time of discipling. God left you, if you're a believer in Christ, here on earth to make disciples.

He has His word of God. He's got His word. He doesn't really need us.

He could write the gospel in the sky for all to see, if He so chose to.

Why did God leave us here? The worship is going to be much better in heaven than on earth.

The praising God is going to be better in heaven than on earth. The fellowship is going to be better in heaven than on earth.

Learning, we're going to learn directly from Christ. It's going to be much better in heaven than on earth. Prayer, we're going to be talking directly face to face with Jesus.

What is going to be better on earth than heaven? Well, nothing really.

Heaven is going to be so much better. In every aspect of Christian life except one. Because there's one thing that's commanded to us to do on earth, and it's impossible in heaven.

And that's to make disciples. So, someone's asking, is sharing with unbelieving coworkers making a disciple?

I would say yes. I actually, as a practice when I would work in the engineering field,

I remember many years ago when I worked at Lucent Technologies, I used to work for Bell Laboratories that became

Lucent Technologies. And what ended up happening was we had a new guy that came in right out of college.

And I was, they called him mentor. But it was a discipling relationship. I was teaching him.

And in that teaching, what I was doing was teaching him all the parts of the project that I knew.

Now, he had the mindset of, oh, job security, I have to know one thing, and I have to be the only one that knows one thing.

So, he kind of learned one aspect of the project and thought if he was the only one that knew it, they would never fire him. And I kept trying to teach him, no, if you teach everyone else to do what you know, when there's new work that comes in, hey, guess who gets to do it?

You're the one that's free. And we ended up getting new work that he really wanted to do. It was given to me. Why?

Because I already taught him how to do all the stuff that I did along with other people. And so, there were other people, because they were the only ones that knew how to do some parts,

I got the new work. When they actually had to lay some people off, this new hire was actually one of the first ones to go because he knew one piece of the project and he was the only one.

But the rationale that the supervisor explained to him is that I would only need to learn that one piece of the project where letting me go and having him, he'd have to learn 90 % of the rest of the project.

And so, the boss just figured, you know what? It's easier to let one person go and have one person learn a small piece than let another person go and have them learn a bigger piece.

And that's the thing. I even discipled when I was at a secular work. Now, I also was seeking to disciple them with the gospel.

That was what I would do. I'd take people out to lunch and I'd share the gospel with them. I actually met my wife because I started a discipling relationship with her at work.

I was a contractor back then for AT &T and I had met her and she was a believer.

So, what did I do? At lunchtime, we would sit down and study the Bible together. In fact, the book that we're going to go through, the

Growing in Grace book, that is right there, that's what

I started going through with my wife. And we started to look at that. And then what I started going through is the lessons in our school of systematic theology.

I started discipling her during lunch because she was a believer. I started teaching her everything that Christ had taught me.

And in doing so, she started to learn. Now, maybe that's not the best way.

Dating discipleship, I don't know. But that's what ended up happening. Out of that, I came to love her maturity and her desire for God's Word and a relationship beyond the discipling one did form in that.

And that's much better than the way many people try to do relationships. But, that aside, that wasn't my intent.

My intent was to disciple her. So, we should be about the business of discipling. We are to be baptizing and then teaching what?

Teaching them to observe all things that Christ has taught us. So, we're to be going about our day, evangelizing to new people.

And how do we make the disciples? We evangelize unbelievers. When they become believers, baptize and then start teaching.

That's the process. And so, in doing that, what we want to do is we want to look at how this is done.

And there's a great passage of Scripture in the Old Testament that talks about this. And that's in Deuteronomy 6.

This is called the Shema. This is if you ever see you enter a Jewish home and on the side of the door post, there'll be a little gold or silver emblem.

And inside is this text that we're going to look at. And it's Deuteronomy 6, 4 -9.

It's called the Shema because that's the first word, the Hebrew word for here is Shema. And so, the text is called the

Shema and it references this passage of Scripture right here. So, it says, Here, O Israel, the

Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the

Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. And these words that I have commanded you today shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children. You shall walk. You shall...

Sorry. You will teach them diligently to your children and you shall talk of them when you sit down in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up.

You will bind them as a sign on your hands. You shall... They shall be on the front lid of your eyes.

You will write them on the doorposts of your houses and on your gates. Now, what the

Jewish people did, unfortunately, is they took the wrong part of that.

They took it quite literally. Now, I think, let's put it up again for a moment.

You see here the importance, I think, of this is that you shall love, verse 5, you shall love the

Lord your God with all your mind, heart, soul, and strength. And it says, and these words

I command you today shall be on your heart and you shall teach them diligently to your children. So, what are we to teach our children?

What we should teach our children diligently is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, might, with everything you got.

Love the Lord. That's what you should be teaching your children. What they ended up doing is taking the other side of it and they said,

Oh, what do we do? Well, when we sit down, we got to do a prayer. When we stand up, we got to say a prayer.

When we lie down in bed, we have to say a prayer. When we get up in bed, we have to say a prayer. We have to...

There's things called phylacteries that have this text in them, the Shema, and they put it, a box, on their hand and they wrap it on their forearms.

So, it's on their hands. They wrap it between their eyes, the front lid of their eyes. They stick what's called a mezuzah, that thing on the door post, and they stick it on their doors.

That's exactly what the text says to do. And so, they focus on the other part of it, which is to do these legalistic type things where you go about doing this ritual.

But, what we really need to be doing is teaching our children to love the

Lord our God with all our mind, heart, soul, and strength. You see, that's how to teach people to observe all things that Christ taught you.

The idea of that passage is in every part of your day, if you're lying down or standing up, you're sitting, you're walking, when you're sitting at the table and relaxing, or you're walking to work, you should be about the business of making disciples in every aspect.

I mean, when you go to the store, look to make disciples. I had a friend of mine who

I got to meet, and he got to pick up on my personality and knew me well kind of quickly.

We were having, I was staying at his home, and we were having Sunday brunch or Sunday breakfast before church.

And he realized, his wife realized, or I think he realized that they were out of certain things.

They had to go to the store. And he says, hey, you want to take a ride? I said, sure. Hop in the car and we take a ride. And as we're trying to rush through the store,

I'm doing what I do, which is I went to the store for a reason, to make disciples. There's unbelievers there that I'm going to start sharing the gospel with.

So I hand a guy a gospel track, and as my friend is looking to pick something up,

I start having a conversation with a gentleman. And a really good conversation, actually.

And so my friend takes off. I figure, okay, he's going to grab me before he leaves, right? Well, I'm waiting for him to come back, but he never comes back.

And I'm starting to get concerned. I'm like, okay, he's probably waiting for me, and I really should go now. So I ended the conversation with this gentleman.

I got to share the gospel with him, got to start the discipling process, gave him my email address, and I go to the cashier, and I don't see my friend.

Maybe he's sitting in the car, and I go over where I thought the car was, but the car's not there. Now I'm kind of wondering, where is he?

And I go, and I look, and I go, maybe I got the wrong aisle, and I look around the different aisles, and I realize, no, the car's not here.

He actually left me. That's right. He left me. And then the next thing

I see is his wife pull up to the store and say, hey, want a ride? She picked me up, brought me back to the house.

Basically, he wanted to make sure breakfast was served and knew that I was going to be more concerned with sharing the gospel and making a disciple than breakfast.

And so he chose to go home and make breakfast and send his wife to pick me up. So he got to know me very well.

But the reality is that as we go to the store, we should be making disciples. If Christ is going to think that this is that important, that he is going to tell us we should be about the business of making disciples, this is his last words, then that's what we should be doing.

We should be seeking to fulfill the Great Commission, and we do that by loving

God and by loving our neighbor. That's what Christ said. That's the two commands he said to do.

And you say, but I'm not a teacher. I'm not good. Well, that's okay, because God actually made it easy for us.

Paul told us that there's only two times that you ever have to worry about teaching people, in season and out of season.

In other words, all the time. That's right, sorry. You're not off the hook. I mean, there's some people who are gifted to teach and they can teach well, and we love to sit under the teaching of those people.

But you know, simple reality, that person doesn't know your neighbor, your co -worker, your family member.

You do. That's why God has gifted you to be one.

We're all commanded to teach. Like it or not, that's what we have to do. God has commanded each one of us to teach.

Even though some of us are more gifted to teach, it's something that we're all commanded to do.

Actually, all the gifts of the Spirit we're commanded to do. Each one of them, the ones that are in use today.

And we're commanded to do those things, but some of those things come natural.

We're all commanded to show mercy, but for some it'll be natural. We're all commanded to give, but for some it'll be more natural.

We're all commanded to teach, but for some it'll be more natural. And so we have to be about the business of making disciples and teaching them all the things that you have learned.

Now, let me explain something to you, because many people think that, well, you have to be really educated.

I really learned a valuable lesson of making disciples by a young girl. Actually, she was only a year younger than me, or two years.

I was 23 at the time and she was about 21, but she had cerebral palsy.

And because she had cerebral palsy, she had the mind of a six -year -old and was never going to get beyond that.

So she ended up not being able to read, in a wheelchair.

She couldn't walk. She was completely dependent on her mother, and her mother was a single mom, worked many jobs.

I actually got to meet her mom before I knew her mom was a believer. Her mom and I went to church together, and this girl

Felicia and I went to church together because her mom would bring her. But I met her mom when I was at university. Her mother used to work at the university that I went to.

I met her mother and Felicia. I decided one time that I was out of work and I wanted to give her mom a break.

I said, I'm going to come by the house for at least an hour each week so you can just get out of the house, go food shopping, relax.

Food shopping is really difficult when you have to push a wheelchair and a cart. I said,

I'm going to give you a break. I'm going to just read the scriptures with Felicia and let you relax.

A lot of times her mother would just sit in the other room and just be like, oh, I can relax. I thought

I would be the discipler and I was going to teach Felicia something. I thought that I would go in and do this.

What I ended up discovering, I was out of work at that time and I didn't have prospects of work coming in.

I was concerned, rightly so. What ended up happening was that she ended up teaching me about what faith is because she really lived by faith.

I remember I would come in and she'd just say, how's the job? Did you find any jobs? I said, no,

Felicia, I haven't been able to find anything. She just had complete trust in God. This was at a time where I was too proud to let anyone know that I had no money.

I eventually got kicked out of my apartment. I was actually paying a woman $50 a week to sleep on her couch with her family.

I wasn't eating. I didn't have food. God kept providing throughout that. Felicia kept saying to me, that's okay,

Andrew. God's going to provide for you. You're going to see. I didn't even tell her that I didn't have food. But she seemed to know and she seemed to just always be like,

God's going to take care of you. Now, Felicia taught me, where I thought I was teaching her, the reality of a discipling relationship is you learn as well.

Now let me tell you something about Felicia. Felicia had a cousin, a very well -known cousin. Now, I don't know some of these people.

I don't know people that play in the NFL and football and basketball. I don't know those players.

I actually sat with my brother once at a place where I sat with some really well -known quarterback and I had no clue.

I'm sitting next to the guy. My brother and I, my brother knew who he was and they knew each other. But I had no idea who the guy is other than the fact that everyone wanted his autograph.

But I'm sitting with Felicia and I saw her cousin see Felicia. And there was a family gathering and her cousin comes in and here this guy comes in.

It wasn't really that cold but he had a fur coat on. He's got two girls on either side and everyone's like,

Oh, Dion, oh, Dion. I have no idea who the guy is. I'm sitting next to Felicia in a wheelchair and this guy walks over and sits down and turns to her and just puts the girls aside, gets down on a knee and says,

How you doing, cousin Felicia? And Felicia just turns to him and says, Cousin Dion, when are you going to repent of your sinful ways?

I see you on TV and what you're doing is not right before God. I saw this guy that I don't think anyone's ever talked to this guy like this before and he just melted in front of his cousin who had the mind of a six year old.

Now I have heard rumor, I don't know him personally, I've never heard his testimony, but the gentleman that was there is a man by the name of Dion Sanders and from what

I understand he is a believer in Christ. I believe he's a believer in the

Christ because of a young girl with the mind of a six year old who had the faith that can move mountains.

And that's the thing you're going to learn in a discipling relationship. Even if you think you're the discipler, there's going to be times that you're also the disciple -ee.

You might learn things. And that's the thing, never think you have to be some teacher.

Only your pastor can disciple. No. God has uniquely gifted each one of us so that we can be the ones to make disciples of the people that we come in contact with.

Don't ever be afraid. And the reality is if you're discipling someone and you're teaching someone and they ask you a question and you don't know the answer to, do what

I do. Say, I don't know, but I'm going to get back to you with an answer. And then go study.

Go ask your pastor. If you're the pastor, go study or ask someone else that knows you.

Ask your seminary professor. Find out, learn, and then go back to that person with the answer. Now, I'm going to give you an overview of the

Growing in Grace book that we're going to spend the next 12 weeks going over. Now, we're going to look at this book.

This is going to be a tool that I'm going to teach you how to use to use in discipleship.

I want to encourage you guys to disciple. So what I want to encourage you to do is if you don't have a copy of this book, you can go out to the store, you can pick up one from our store, and we'll ship them out to you.

If you want to, if you really enjoy this and you want to start implementing it in your church, your small group, your homeschool, your college campus, you can order them in larger quantities and save the money on shipping, and we'll get them to you.

All right? And so you could do that. But here is a little overview of what we're going to be going over in the next 12 to 13 weeks, next three months.

Now, if you see here, this is kind of broken down in a way for us to see.

We're going to first talk about these are 12 lessons that I think are important for new believers.

Now, you're going to be surprised actually. Hold on, before I get to the lessons, let me say this. I know some of you are going to go, well, hey, you know, there's people in our church that have been saved for like, you know, 30 years.

I'm not going to go through these lessons with them. Let me tell you a story about this. The pastor that actually started writing this book was my pastor's pastor.

Now, he stepped down from ministry, and he ended up coming to our church. Now, our church policy, it was called

Gospel Light Baptist Church. It no longer exists, and my pastor's now in Minnesota, but, or Minnesota, if you want to pronounce it that way.

They get lots of snow there. But he's out in Minnesota, but he had a policy that anyone that came to the church, they went through this

Bible study. Now, his pastor, who initially wrote the initial draft of this

Bible study, he starts coming to the church, and it was my job to teach him.

And I remember the first week, I said, you know, Jim, what am I going to possibly teach you?

You wrote this thing. I mean, at least the initial one. I mean, in the leadership of that church, we all kind of edited it, and made changes to it, and kind of made it our own, and we've all kind of even taken on in our own way, taking added lessons, taking out lessons, and made it our own.

But I said, what can I teach you? I mean, you wrote the original version of this, and he said,

Andrew, if I'm too proud to submit to your teaching, that says

I have a problem with pride. I have things I can learn from you, so we should get together every week and do this.

And I was like, okay. The other thing I found is when I do this, I implemented this in a church where, in one church where I was pastoring, and I discovered that a lot of people didn't know the basics, even though they've been in church for a long, long time.

And so, as we go through this, I'm just saying that to say it's a good thing for each of us to remember that this may be new for some people, these lessons.

We're going to start by looking at what we're calling the receiving of His grace, then look at the living of His grace, and then the sharing of His grace.

How is that? Well, we're going to look at, first category, the receiving of His grace. We're going to look at salvation, the reconciliation with our

Lord. Then we're going to look at prayer, the access to our Lord. And third, we're going to look at the

Bible, the revelation of our Lord. Next, we're going to look at living

His grace. We're going to look at baptism, identifying with our Lord. Then we're going to look at the church, which talks about serving our

Lord. We're going to talk about the remembrance of the Lord's table, or the

Lord's table, which is the remembrance of our Lord. Then we're going to talk about testings, which is always an interesting one.

Trials and temptations, that's going to talk about the persevering for our Lord. We can talk about obedience, the commitment to our

Lord. Talk about holiness, living like our Lord. We're going to talk about stewardship, which is offering for our

Lord. Then we're going to start a third section, which is sharing His grace, which talks about evangelism, which is speaking for our

Lord. And then we're going to talk about the Christian home, which is a legacy for our

Lord. And so, those are the 12 lessons that we're going to go through in the next couple of weeks, as we go through this class as an introduction to discipleship.

So this is a way of trying to train you on how one tool that we use, and I use this tool for this reason, it becomes a way with newer believers of kind of training them in the, basically in the faith for new believers.

And one of the things that, and someone's mentioning this in a chat room, I don't know who that person is, but I'd like them to give their real name if they could, because they obviously have used this study before, because they know that it's a little bit helpful right now to use this in the

New King James. The way this study works, and the way we're going to encourage you, and if you have a copy already, this is what

I'm going to encourage you to do. Before the next class, which will not be next week, if you're watching live, but before the next class, do lesson one on your own.

This is how we end up doing this, and if you use a New King James Bible, if you use that translation, the lessons are usually right out of that.

If you have a New King James, it's going to be very easy to see what's being talked about. Alright? So, that's going to be something that might be helpful for you.

We're going to maybe revise this to use the English Standard Version, so as we go through this class, we're going to actually use the

English Standard Version for all of the passages, and we're going to see how that works, and we might give an updated version in the future.

So, if you're using an older version, the first edit of it, that's going to be the case.

So, what we're going to do is this, we encourage you to use the New King James as you go through that. So, before next class, try to do lesson one on your own.

What I encourage people to do when I go through this is to do it in pencil.

Write the answers in pencil. What I do with new believers is I say this, I say, listen, fill it in in pencil, and I tell them, if you have any questions in any of your devotions, anything, bring it when we get together, and that allows for not just discussing the lesson, but after a lesson, you can spend more time going into questions they have.

If they're a new believer, they tend to have a lot of questions, and you may not have all the answers, but it helps you to learn some of the questions that you should have.

And so, oh, so that, oh, okay. I just was told that the person that knew to use

New King James is our guitar player from Union Square, Mr. Todd, which had a great way of evangelism.

All he did was he went out with a guitar and started just playing, because we had church in the open air in Union Square this past Sunday, and so he, afterwards, was just playing guitar, and he had people coming up going, hey, can you teach me how to play?

Hey, can I play? And he would just start sharing the gospel while they're playing guitar, or he's trying to teach them to play guitar there.

Oh, hey, I know this song, and they play Stairway to Heaven, and he starts talking about heaven. It was great.

That was discipleship, the first steps of discipleship. Yeah, I think he actually talked to someone who was a believer and got to share with them more, and that's what we were doing.

So what I encourage you to do is take lesson one, go and study it, and then you fill it in in pencil, and then we're going to go through the lessons, and you can fill the answers in a pen.

The other thing I want to encourage you, and this is what I encourage people that I do this discipleship guide with,

I want to encourage you to not read a Bible verse. So if there's a verse, read the whole chapter if you can.

You're going to get a lot more out of it, okay? So that is going to be your homework for next class.

Now I said there will be no class next week. Why? I will be in New York City doing a training for the

Jesus Loves Chinatown. It's part of the New York short -term missions. I've been doing it now for,

I don't know, five, six years, maybe seven years, something like that, where there's a dozen or so Chinese churches that gather together, and they do a

Chinese training, and I do the English training. So I will be there in New York City next

Monday. I always say that I'll try to do a class or do maybe something live, but it will not happen.

I know that. Sorry. So we're not going to have class next week. And even the week after is questionable because this is the time of year where I do a lot of traveling.

I will be going South Carolina this weekend. I go right from South Carolina to New York.

As soon as I get back from New York, I go straight to Ohio, and I'll be speaking at a church out

Sunday morning in Ohio, shoot right back, and I do not know when

I'm going to be leaving Ohio. It's a 10 -hour drive. I don't know what time I'm going to be back on Monday, and I don't know if I'll be able to prepare class.

I will try, but I'm not making a promise. So there may be two weeks where we don't have class, and I'm sorry about that.

That's really a downer. I just started a new class, and now I'm saying, hey, got you all excited? Well, maybe

I think that it's going to take you two weeks to do your homework. Tells me what I think of my students,

I guess. Wow. But if you have any questions, in the meantime, you can always email us at academyatstrivingforeturning .org.

And again, if you want to get the Growing in Grace book, please go to our website, storeatstrivingforeturning .org,

and order the Growing in Grace book so that you have it. And I'm giving you the time so that it can be ordered and shipped to you in time for next class.

All right? Now, as we do, as many of you know, when we end our class, we want to end by encouraging you to encourage someone else.

And this really came home to me yet again. We started this because, really, we started this as a weekly thing because we realized that, well, quite frankly,

I went to a funeral many, many years ago and realized that we say some of the nicest things about someone after they die. And this week, unfortunately,

I had that experience again. A friend of my son's in school, a 19 -year -old boy who seemed to be in fine health just last week, riding his bike, running.

I used to coach him on the track team, and his mother said to me at the funeral, you know, he was still running even up to last week.

And then something happened, and he lost his life. He got sick.

He, you know, I don't really know all the details, but a 19 -year -old boy died. And we went to the funeral, and person after person got up and said some of the most wonderful things about him, and I wonder if he ever heard those things said of him.

So we do this as something to remind each of us to be encouraging people every day.

Try to encourage people. We want to encourage you to encourage people. excuse me, the one thing that encourages me about this person is he's going out of his way to make it to the

NorCal Fire. So I'll throw that plug in, shameless plug for NorCal Fire, September 12th and 13th.

Register now. We gotta get registration up. Paul Taylor will be speaking at that.

Greg Coco will be speaking at that. The topic there will be apologetics. So NorCalFire .info.

Go register now. Who is that brother? Now, I'm gonna say this up front, that this brother was, we received this name from someone.

They said, hey, I think this brother is going through a rough time and needs encouragement. Now, I don't know what he's going through, but I do know that I love this guy, and that's brother

Chris Honholz. He is a dear, dear brother.

We joke around. He and I joke around a lot on Facebook, but in all seriousness, though we joke with one another,

I love this guy. I mean, he thinks I'm nuts, but I really can't wait.

When I saw that he registered for NorCal Fire, I admit, I got excited. I was happy, because I knew

I'd be seeing him again. I look forward to going out there, because I get to see him.

I was so thrilled when I got to meet him and just spend time with him and his son last year.

The relationship we have online, I love his spirit. Okay, he's a comic book fanatic, okay?

You gotta get over that, you know? But, other than that, he works diligently to serve a friend of the ministry here,

Tony Miano, in Cross Encounters Radio. He serves faithfully there.

He does a lot, he also works full -time as a police officer. He's a dad, so he has a family.

But, I don't know what the issues may be, but I was told that he just needs some extra encouragement this week.

So, with that, I want to encourage you guys to encourage him this week, if you could.

And not sure why he may need more encouragement, but God knows, there's regular times we always need the encouragement.

So, I encourage you to encourage him specifically this week, but maybe you can make it a habit of not just encouraging

Chris every day this week, but you can encourage others as well.

Let them know. Let your family members know what you're thinking about them. It may encourage them more than you can ever know.

So, until next class, which will be in two weeks, I want to encourage you to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.