2 - The Marks and Methods of an Effective Discipler

Well, welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Discipleship with the first class, which is our Introduction to Discipling. We are glad to have you with us in this class and we are going to begin.

If you happen to have a copy of the Growing in Grace book, it is the book that we're going to use. Now, I'm saying this up front to say this is a book that we're using to facilitate discipleship. It is not the only way to do discipleship, but it is a way.

It's a product that we have available. It was actually written by several men in a leadership of my old church, my first church, actually. And I want to start off by saying that I encourage your church to write their own discipleship guide.

If you don't have one, you'd be more than welcome to go to our website and purchase one from our store. But if not, you can go and take it, well, maybe purchase one so you get an idea, some ideas of topics.

And then what I recommend you do is write it for your church so that it is customized to your church. That's what I recommend you do. But if not, we have it available for you. So, we are going to be getting in.

These lessons were designed really for you to hand the book, the Growing in Grace book, to somebody that you want to disciple. So, what you would do is you would give them the book. You say, you know, here you go, I have something for you.

It's their first week in church and you want to start a relationship or they just get saved or maybe you want to see if you're starting a relationship. You go, hey, here's a copy of a book. Why don't we get together and go through it?

What you do is you will give them the book and they give you some lessons where I have them filled in the blanks. You'll have the blanks there and you'll ask them to do a lesson. Then what you'll do is you get together with them.

After they've done the lesson, I recommend letting them do it in pencil first, fill in all the blanks and then you get together with them for maybe an hour, hour and a half and go through the lesson with them.

I say maybe because what you want to do is you want to be open to allowing more time if they have questions, especially if they're a new believer. If they are a new believer, then what you want to do is you want to be aware of the fact that they're going to have a lot of questions about the Bible.

You want to maybe allow more time or maybe not be in a rush to finish a lesson. There is no limit on how long it must take you to get through this study. Actually, in one sense, the more weeks you study, the more time you have to develop a relationship with that person and continue discipling them.

We may eventually put out a second book that you can use. This book here, the Growing in Grace book, will take you probably about three months to get through with a student and if you were to do that, you'd have that time where you're building the relationship.

You may want to spend time where you're developing, you know, needing more time to just keep a relationship going. Maybe you want to go six months. We're going to probably have something else later on, but you're more than welcome to order a copy of our Systematic Theology and start going through that with them.

You have the lessons that we have in our Systematic Theology class that you can use and go through that with them. So, what I'm going to do, I don't know that I'm going to finish or even really get into lesson one.

The thing is, is that we, I do have the lesson kind of laid out, but what I want to do first is give some, just a little bit of feedback, I guess, on some ideas for, to help you with discipling. And so, what I want to do is, I want to start with giving some, kind of really just an introduction to some things that would make you a more effective discipler before we get into the lessons themselves.

That sound alright? Now, this was something I kind of put together last minute. In other words, this was something where I don't have all of the passages on screen. So, you're going to actually have to, that's right, go get your Bible.

You know, it's one of these things, or maybe you have one of these things. Okay, look, go get one of these and open up your Bible app, not your texting, not your Facebook. Facebook's not the Bible, okay?

Alright, so go get your Bible. We're going to open to some scriptures tonight, and I won't be able to put them on screen. I've changed some things around. Therefore, when we get to the end of class, where we always have a person to encourage, I don't have that slide done, but, so, because I've made some changes here.

So, we're sorry about that, but we'll have it for next class. Don't worry. So, we are going to be looking at just some things that you will not see in your book. So, make sure you have your book ready and handy and available.

But, as we begin this class on an introduction to discipleship, I first wanted just to give you an overview of some of the lessons that we're going to look at as we go through the book of growing in grace.

And we went through this before, but I just want to recoup and show you kind of the progress. See, we're going to move from looking at receiving God's grace, meaning salvation and prayer in the Bible, to living out His grace through baptism, the church membership, the Lord's Supper, dealing with testings and obedience and holiness, and then stewardship to sharing His grace in evangelism and the Christian home.

So, that's where we're going to be going as we work through these lessons in this class. Now, what I want to do as we go through this is work through some ways of teaching you or training you to be a more effective discipler, to be someone who would be more effective as a person who's going to be engaged in discipleship.

So, discipleship as it relates to Christianity has been defined as one person teaching another person how to live a godly life. Now, that's one-to-one is the best way. If you paid attention last class, in the last class we discussed that process, alright?

And what it means, we said in our vernacular it would be to make a Xerox image of yourself, alright? And so, that is what that would look like. And so, what we have here is a case where we want to train people, teach them all things that Christ has taught us and we want to do that in such a way that they're going to be trained to live a godly life.

That's the goal, to live more like Christ. Now, the discipling relationships may vary from mature Christian to new Christian, parent to child, leader to potential leader, okay? These are different ways and those are just some of the ways.

You could have people that you're both at kind of the same spiritual maturity but you both know different things and can learn one from another and that's going to be the thing. If you remember what we said in the last class that discipling is not only you teaching but also receiving.

You're always going to be looking to learn from as well. We always want to be teachable. So, this discipling relationship can vary in that way. To effectively make a new believer, to take a new believer from infancy to maturity, one must possess the marks of an effective discipler and follow the methods of an effective discipler and that's what we're going to take this lesson to look at because that's going to be our goal.

Many of us, we've seen probably people in our churches who have been in church pews most of their lives, maybe even longer than some of us have been alive and yet their maturity level is not as much as we would think it should be after all that time.

There's some reasons for that. Some is because people grow at different rates. Totally understand that. There's also a problem with some of the churches, even some of the pastors and that is that sometimes what some pastors do is they want a big church.

They want to see people serving. What happens is once a person moves out of infancy into service, not necessarily maturity, they get excited and plug them into the church and get them working and get them serving and they stop really growing.

What ends up happening is all discipleship is then handled from a pulpit and the pastor is going to be teaching from a pulpit and the assumption is that that will be how they're going to be discipled and learn, but that is not the model of discipleship.

Many of us would say that the Sunday morning message should not replace preaching with drama because preaching is God's way that He's ordained to communicate His Word to His people. We understand that, but preaching is not God's ordained means for discipleship.

That He has ordained one-on-one, you and I discipling others. That's what we have to be about the business doing, alright? So, let us look maybe on a separate sheet of paper or in some margins of your notes, maybe on a separate sheet of paper because we're going to have too much information.

You can always watch this later on YouTube to get anything you miss, okay? But first, I want to look at some marks of an effective disciple and this comes from several sources that I've gathered some of this stuff from, but in this section, we'll note the teachings of Christ Himself to the twelve disciples who were to be the foundation of the church according to Ephesians 2 .20.

These marks of an effective disciple should be evidence in all disciples. This section that I'm going to talk about is actually adopted from A. B. Bruce's The Training of the Twelve. So, if you've ever read his book, you'll know where this is coming from.

I don't want to take credit for things that I haven't really done. I've just adapted this to help you guys out. So, one is the first mark of an effective disciple is fellowship with Christ. Fellowship with Christ.

The disciples were intimately involved in a relationship with Jesus Christ. I mean, they talked with Him, they learned from Him, they ate with Him, they lived with Him. The emphasis that each discipler of others must have is to be faithful to Bible reading and prayer.

If you don't have a strong, close, intimate relationship with Christ, how can you lead others in what you don't have? And that's the reality. You cannot teach what you do not know. You cannot bring another person into an intimate relationship with Christ if you don't have an intimate relationship with Christ.

One of the things when we get to the lesson on prayer is, as we go through this, I'll share with you some of my prayer list. Why do I do it? I do that because I want people to see the ways that I pray.

Not to say I pray this super spiritual way, but it's an idea of showing we need to be able to model a good prayer life, a good Bible reading time. There's men who I disciple and I keep accountable with who we will ask one another, hey, what have you read today from the Scriptures?

What has God been, you know, kind of illuminating your mind to from your time in His Word? So, you need to have a fellowship with Christ. Now, there's a reason this is important. You don't want to be so busy about the business of discipling that you're forsaking your own relationship with Christ.

I mean, there's guys I know, they're out there evangelizing the lost and they're spending a lot of time out on the streets, but they don't spend as much time in the Word. And what ends up happening in those times is that they go out in their own power of their own flesh and they can preach, but they, where's their intimate relationship that they're trying to tell these other people that they're going to need?

So, fellowship with Christ is the first mark of an effective discipler. The second mark of an effective discipler is abiding in Christ, abiding in Christ. For the sake of time, I'm not going to read all of John 15, 1 to 12.

I encourage you to do it. It is Jesus in the upper tomb and He is sharing with His disciples and He's basically saying, you got to be abided. You know, there's a vine and the vine dresser is going to cut off the dead roots and he's going to graft in roots and you got to be, you have to be attached to the root.

You have to be abiding with Christ. All right. So, there's some requirements that we see in that and let's look in verse 3 here. It says, verse 3, already you are clean because you have the word that I have spoken.

So, one is that there's a cleansing through the word of God. We have to be reading the word of God because we need to be cleansing ourselves. That is one of the things the word of God does. Many people don't understand the book of Leviticus very well, but if you look at for some key words, you're going to figure out the purpose of that book.

Read through the first, say, 15 chapters and you're going to see some phrases coming up. Pure, purity, cleanse, cleanliness, clean. All those rules are to show that we need to be clean before God and one of the ways we have that clean, cleanliness and purity is by looking to God's word.

We have to be rooted in God's word. Second is keeping Christ's command. We see that in verses 10 and 12. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love.

In verse 12, this is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. So, if we are, one requirement is to be in God's word. A second is to be obedient. Okay, we have to be obedient. It doesn't mean we're going to be perfect, but it means that we must be obedient to God's word.

Now, the results of an abiding relationship you can see in verse 2 and verses 4 and 5 and it is that we would be bearing fruit. We got to be fruit bearers and bearing fruit and also purging for more fruit.

If you have a bush or if you have a garden, you have a, say you're growing a tomato plant. One of the things you do is you're going to trim off any dead branches. Why? If you see that branch starting to die off, well, it's still taking nutrients that the rest of the plant needs and yet you don't want to feed good nutrients to a dying part of the plant.

So, what do you do? Well, you cut that part off. Get rid of it. Get rid of sin in your life that's going to hinder you so that you can bear more fruit. Alright? Another result is that it's a fulfilled purpose.

We as Christians have the purpose of being fruit bearers. Well, if we are going to be discipling, we are going to be fulfilling the purpose of the Great Commission. Matthew 28, 19, and 20. We are going to make disciples and teaching them all things that we have been taught.

And it gives real true fulfillment in life. I know that many are familiar with that wonderful book. Is there enough sarcasm in that? The Purpose Driven Life. I understand there's some that actually like that book and, you know, there are some good things in that book.

I don't want to say that the whole book is bad. It's not that the whole book is bad. But there are some things in that book that I would not recommend. The gospel presentation, for one, is very weak in that book.

And it gives a very surface level of who God is. And it really doesn't present a very high view of God as much as it presents a high view of man. That would be my issue with it. But that said, we don't want to be guilty of just saying, well, just because of that book that may have some bad stuff in it or weak stuff in it, doesn't mean that God didn't make us to have purpose in life.

And we, as we abide with Christ, we fulfill that purpose. And as we abide in Christ, we do have the fulfilled life that other people write books about, but they miss the main point of. It's not that we live a life for ourselves so we can be fulfilled.

Oh yeah, look, I've got a fulfilled life. I've got a purpose in life. Oh yeah. No. That's the byproduct. It is a result. We do that because we want to please God. Okay, so we lift God up on high. All right?

Number three is forsaking physical attachment. Let me read in Luke 5 .11. And it says here, when they had brought their boats, they left everything and followed him. And that's what happened with the disciples.

When Christ said, follow me, they left everything. They left their worldly possessions and all that and left their physical attachment. Forsaking their physical attachment, they followed Christ. And a good mark of a good disciple is going to do that.

We must relinquish all worldly attachments and allegiances in order to be controlled and led by the Holy Spirit. Okay? A fourth one would be self-denial and sacrifice. Oh, those words don't, I don't like those in my American Christianity.

Self-denial? No. Right? I mean, everything that we read in modern Christianity, sacrifice is not a word you're going to read in most of those books. Okay? Self-denial? Are you kidding me? They don't talk about that.

Most of the books that you see in Christian bookstores are about living for self. Getting more for self. That's why this one flies in the face of the modern American evangelical church. But if you want to be an effective discipler, you're going to want to live a life of self-denial and sacrifice.

Meaning, you know, the meaning of bearing the cross. Christ told His disciples they're going to have to carry the cross. And the meaning of that means to be suffering for righteousness' sake. And folks, brothers and sisters, those of you who know Jesus Christ, I've got news for you.

In America, we've lived very comfortably for a long time, but that time is passing. And we are going to live in a time where we're going to have to suffer for righteousness' sake. And I don't mean people making fun of you on Facebook.

Or people not wanting to hang out with you at your job site. I mean real suffering. And we've got to be ready for that. There's got to be a willingness to be crucified with Christ. Kill the flesh. We have to be to a point where the government comes after us and says, you must be killed because you're a Christian.

As some of our brothers and sisters in the world are dealing with. As they're getting the word Christian painted on their door. Letting everyone know that you can go in and kill the people in this home.

That is something that's real. And many of them are not leaving their home, but standing up for Christ. I'm not saying that we have to be a martyr. But the reality is, we have to be willing to die for Christ.

It also means any trouble that we may endure, just enduring the trouble. Not looking for a way of escape. Now, the results of bearing the cross of Matthew 16, 25 -27. We're gaining in our spiritual life.

We're maturing. We're gaining in spiritual reward. We're going to, the more that we practice self-denial as, oh by the way, the best example of someone ever doing that. What's his name? Oh right, Christ.

Almighty God denied Himself, came to earth as a man, put aside the use of His deity in full by taking on a human form and allowing, boggles my mind, the Almighty God that created the universe, allowed sinful, wicked men who are enemies of God to nail Him to a cross and hang Him on a tree?

Are you kidding me? You want to talk self-denial? There is nothing that you and I could ever do that practices self-denial and sacrifice more than what Christ did. And that is the example that you and I must follow.

And I know that that flies in the face of modern evangelicalism. I understand. That's not your best life now. That's not, you know, your purpose-driven life. That's the Bible. And I would rather live by that.

Just saying. And if you want to disciple someone into living a righteous life, you got to first be living one. Which means you got to be denying yourself, as Galatians 2 .20 says. We have to be crucified with Christ.

It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. The life that I live in the flesh, I now live through Jesus Christ. Number five, voluntary humility. This you'll see in John 13, the first 14 verses where Jesus again gives the ultimate example of humility.

Picture the scene there. Here you have all the disciples. In that time, you would enter a home. People would wear sandals. Your feet got dirty. You'd clean people's feet. That's what you'd do when you'd enter a home.

And it was the job of the lowliest servant to clean the feet. But here they're at the Passover Seder. And what are the disciples doing? They are each arguing amongst themselves over who is the greatest among them.

Who's going to be the greatest? I'm going to be better than you. I mean, just picture the scene. You know, Peter's going, hey, I'm going to be better than you guys because I'm the one that's closest to Jesus.

I'm always hanging out with him. And maybe John is going, yeah, but Peter, you're the one that's always sticking your foot in your mouth. I mean, every time you open your mouth, it's only to exchange feet.

I'm better than you because, you know, I'm the one that the Lord loved. I got to sit next to him, you know, or whatever. I mean, they're all arguing who's going to be better. Judas is probably arguing, yeah, but I, the Lord trusts me with the money box.

But I mean, each one of them is probably arguing how they're better. Okay. But as they argue over who's the greatest, what does Jesus do? He takes off His outer garment to take on the role of a slave so that He could take the role of the lowest of slaves and wash the disciples' feet.

And He says He does this as an example for them. So what's the meaning of this foot washing? One, it's condescension. You see that in verses 12 to 14 of John 13. Jesus showed condescension. They're arguing over who's the greatest, and He lowered Himself.

He humbled Himself. Verse 8 shows submission. Jesus submitted Himself. The God of the universe submitted Himself to these disciples. In verses 14 and 15, it also shows service. The meaning of foot washing is condescension, submission, and service.

The result of foot washing is seen in verse 17, blessed are you. Jesus declares a blessing on these people that would do such a thing as to humble themselves. Notice this is so opposite to the prayer of Jabez.

Let me pray that God would extend my borders and give me everything I want and give me great honor. No. Jesus said, humble yourself, condescend, be lower because our pride wants to lift us up. God calls us to lower ourselves, humiliate ourselves.

Sixly, six mark of an effective discipler is a selfless service, a selfless service. Let me give you some passages for this. I encourage you to look this up later, but you can look at Mark 9, 33 to 37, also verses 42 to 50.

You can also look at Luke chapter 9, verse 46 to 48. Alright, so that was Luke 9, 46 to 48, and a more lengthy passage would be Mark 9, Mark 9, verses, I mean you can look at 33 to 50, but it's really specifically going to be Mark 33 to 37, and then 42 to 50.

Alright, it would be the passages to look at there. And you're going to see there how Jesus will talk about a selfless service. Selfless service means that you are willing to give up your time, your pleasures, or even your possessions in order to minister to someone and disciple someone in the faith.

Alright, and that's what you're going to end up seeing in that passage, in those passages. Now, let us move from the marks of an effective discipler to the method of an effective discipler, and I want to spend the rest of our time that we have on this.

Alright, now, there are several vital elements necessary for an effective discipler. Now, this here that we're going to go through is adopted by Robert Coleman's book, The Master Plan of Evangelism. Okay, again, Robert Coleman's book, The Master Plan of Evangelism.

That's where I've gotten these methods, or adapted them from. I want to encourage you, that's a good book to read. So, what we want to look at as we go through this, the methods. So, we saw the marks, six marks of an effective discipler.

Now, the methods of an effective discipler. The first method is information. One aspect of discipling another is providing information to them. If you are going to take on the task, which, oh, by the way, if you're paying attention in our last class, if you are a Christian, it is your responsibility to be a discipler, therefore, I'm speaking to you if you know Christ, okay?

One aspect of discipling is going to be teaching them all things that Christ has taught you. It's information. That is what it says in Matthew 28, 19 and 20, right? The way we go about making disciples is teaching them.

Well, you can't teach without information, right? So, the time has to be informational. The type of information depends on the spiritual growth and development of the individual that you're discipling.

New believer, you're going to disciple different than a potential leader, future leader, okay? Bring a new believer along in initial stages in their growth that will require some basic keys and that's what we're going to do.

We're going to focus on training up someone that's a new believer and that's where we're going to go through the Growing in Grace book. But, you know, one thing you could do in discipling is just taking people along with you.

I did this as a father. I would go somewhere and I'd take my kids. You know, you want to go to the library? Hey, I'm going to go to the library. You want to take a ride with me? And I'd try to use that time in the car to have discussions.

And sometimes, I guess my kids kind of got to know if I said, hey, you want to take a ride with me? It meant I wanted to just sit and chat with them. I wanted to talk with them. It should be informational.

But that information can be disseminated in many different forms. As we said in the last class, you can run and have conversation and have it informational. I suggest you find someone to run with that runs at a pace where you can teach them and speak without going, oh, that's really either going to get you in really good shape, but it's not going to teach very much.

So, I don't suggest you run with someone like Amina, all right? Because I would be huffing and puffing and not teaching a whole lot. All right. So, but that being said, what we're going to do is you want to disseminate information.

The second method of an effective discipler is demonstration. A vital aspect of disciple making is demonstrating for them an exemplary life, a life by example. That's what Paul said. Paul said that we should go and follow after him as he follows after Christ.

And that's what we want to be doing. So, we, as we are going, we're going to follow some, we're going to have someone discipling us. And as we're modeling Christ, as they're modeling Christ, we're going to model Christ for someone else.

All right? Which being a demonstration means that we're always being watched. And I got news for you. If you think you're not being watched as a Christian, I got news for you. You're wrong. You're being watched.

All right? Always. You're being watched as a Christian. The unsaved world is watching you. New believers are watching you. You're being watched. And so, use that. Just be mindful of that. It is, you can look at 1 Corinthians 4 .16, or 1 Corinthians 11 .1, or Philippians 3 .17 to see some of this explained in examples.

But in that list of scriptures that I gave you, what you'll see in that is that while there's some one-time spiritual events such as a spiritual baptism, think of ways in which we may use things to be examples to others.

You know, I remember, I actually learned in a negative way, I knew someone who, a pastor who really had a hard time allowing people to see that he failed. That he sinned. And I learned how to kind of correct things in my own life because he never put on display failure.

He never showed us how to fail. And what ended up happening is that we would end up kind of, if we follow that model, failing the way he did and trying to cover it up. Alright? Someone's asking for the scriptures again.

Okay, it's 1 Corinthians 4 .16, 1 Corinthians 11 .1, and Philippians 3 .17. Now, these videos are on YouTube, so you can always re-watch them, pause, and start up again. Just saying. So, but we need to learn from example.

Let me tell you an illustration of how I discipled one couple. And this was a case where I had to disciple them. They were in a addiction recovery program and had to do eight months of counseling with a husband and wife.

And what I did was I invited them over for dinner. We had to meet for an hour a week. That was a requirement. What I did was I met, said, let's meet and we'll have dinner. And the wife ended up saying that she learned things just watching me have dinner with my family that she could never have learned in a Bible study.

Because my wife and I were just an example. We didn't hide things. We didn't pretend to be something we weren't. I mean, when we had a frustrated day, we blew it. When the kids would act up, they would blow it.

When we had to ask the kids for forgiveness, we did so. You know, we lived in front of them. Actually, that dinner continued for about two and a half years because they just enjoyed it. And so we ended up really getting to know them.

And that was a two and a half year time of great discipleship. And how did we do it? We did it over dinner. You can do that. And so you want to demonstrate your life, which means you've got to be living a righteous life if you're going to demonstrate one, right?

The third method of an effective disciple is delegation. 2 Timothy 2 .2, Paul talks about four generations. Paul taught Timothy and he tells Timothy to teach other faithful men so these other faithful men will teach others.

You have four generations, Paul to Timothy, Timothy to faithful men, faithful men to others. And that is how we are to do things, okay? So that we're living in a way where we're displaying that, alright?

And so another aspect of disciple making is delegation. This is allowing the one you're discipling to experience the things that you've taught them and demonstrate them. Some examples, let me give you some examples so you have, you know, an idea.

Instructing an individual in a new convert study, bringing them with you on another study, then delegate them to answer a new convert. So you're teaching them and they start to mature. Maybe you're going Gracebook and they're in lesson 10 or 11 or 12 and now you're starting another lesson with someone that's in lesson 1, 2 or 3.

Maybe you take that person who's in lesson 10 with you on lesson 2. Let them answer a couple questions. Let them get their feet wet, alright? That would be a good thing to do. Instructing an individual in witnessing and then allowing them to see how you witness and delegating them.

I do that all the time. When I take people out witnessing with me who don't know how to share the gospel, I explain some things. Hey, here's how to do it. Then I go and I demonstrate it. I go and have a one-on-one conversation.

And then what I often will do is I'll say, hey, now it's going to be your turn. I'm going to start the conversation. I'll get into talking about the law and the bad news. Then I'm going to transition to the grace and the good news and I'm going to let you take over.

And then I let them take over. Then I let them start a conversation. What am I doing? I'm slowly delegating to them. I'm giving them more and more responsibility. What a lot of people do is they think, sorry, you can't do that because you may make a mistake.

A lot of parents do that, by the way. Allow your kids to make a mistake. That's how you learned. It's how they're going to learn. Let them make mistakes on small things. I've said this, you know, my wife and I would have these discussions because my kids, I have one child that used to be a little bit quick with spending money.

And so I let him do that. And he got some money and right away he spent it. I just gave it away because I have one boy and one girl. Gee, bad, bad boy. Okay. So, I know some of you in the studio audience would love to do the smacking there, smacking me in the face.

I know, but you can't. Sorry. No smacking the teacher. Only he can smack himself. But, you know, my son would be quick with spending money. So I let him. And he would spend a lot of money on something that was kind of silly.

And my wife was like, why do you let him do that? I said, because I'd rather him blow like $30 on something stupid than $30 ,000 on like a car that he doesn't need. Okay. Let him waste it on something small.

So he realizes, because that's basically what he did. He went out and he bought like these really expensive sneakers that he just had to have. Worked hard for the summer and then realized all the money he earned for the summer went for sneakers.