Discipleship

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the.

Podcast. Thank you. I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are Michael Durham, Chris Giesler, Andrew Hudson, David Kasson. We have another great question that was sent in to us by Joe DeForest and this is on the topic of discipleship.

The question reads, what if another believer comes to you and asks to be discipled in the Christian faith? What should that process look like? What truths of faith should be emphasized first and most?

And we were talking off-air before this and we asked a question or the question was asked, how often does this actually happen when a young Christian or a Christian at all comes to another man or woman and asked to be discipled and how might we discern when they're asking.

Without actually asking? Yeah, that's a great way to put the matter. If you wait, I mean if you listen to this podcast and maybe you do some research on your own and say, okay, this is what a discipleship process looks like, this is the way a discipling relationship is navigated, and you kind of bring all those things into your orbit of meditation and planning and so on, and then you sit back and kind of wait.

You know, okay, when will somebody ask me to disciple them? You know, this is not likely to occur. Usually, if you get the question of someone coming to you and saying, hey, can you help me grow? Can you disciple me?

Can you teach me these things and so forth? It's because they see you already doing it. And so, why would you already be doing it? You know, what right do you have to try to, you know, edify a brother or a sister in Christ?

By what authority do you proceed to share truths of Scripture and to encourage somebody else in their following after Christ? Because Jesus told you to, right? It's pretty basic to all Christianity, right?

So Matthew 28 verse 18 says, Jesus came and spoke to them saying, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.

And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Amen. So, this should be part and parcel to your life as a Christian. You should be making disciples. Very often, that does not look like a formal relationship where somebody does come and ask you, but that might occur.

That very well might occur, and that will probably occur if you are actively making disciples. Now, Jesus is the master. Jesus is the teacher. Who he is and what he says, that is the measure to which we are all to be conformed.

So in my following after Christ, I want to help others do that too, because I want to be loving others as Christ has loved me. So this is not an opportunity to, you know, display my prowess and knowledge of the Bible and the scope of my spiritual experiences, the wealth of my holiness I gladly bestow upon you.

You know, this is not a situation in which we are to be prideful. We are to serve one another as brothers, just serve one another as sisters. So, to keep that in mind, if you are currently laboring as a member of a local church, taking accountability in that church covenant for one another's spiritual health, then discipleship begins by, what, praying with others?

I'm gonna sit next to this person and pray with them and for them. I'm going to stand next to this person and behind that person and in front of the other one, and I'm gonna sing. I'm going to teach and admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.

This is what it looks like, discipleship, just in the infancy stages. How am I discipling others? I'm gonna write an encouraging note to somebody. I'm gonna text somebody, call somebody up on the phone, say, hey, how can I pray for you?

These are acts of service and love, but thereby you end up teaching others and exhorting others and edifying others. There is a role for more formal focused discipleship, and Paul writes to Timothy in 2nd Timothy chapter 2, and in verse 1, you therefore my son, now Paul looks at Timothy as his son.

They had a father-son relationship in the faith. Very clearly, this is an ongoing deep discipling relationship. You therefore my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and the things that you have heard from me, there's discipleship relationship number one, the things that you have heard from me among many witnesses within the context of the church, right?

So there's another relationship, another direction for that. Commit these to faithful men, the things that Timothy heard from Paul attested to by many witnesses in the context of the local church. This is not Paul and Timothy on their own with their secret knowledge.

This is within the context of the larger fellowship of the church, okay? What you have heard, commit these to faithful men, all right? So from Paul to Timothy in the context of the local church, commit these to faithful men.

From Paul to Timothy to these faithful men, who will be able to teach others also? So that's four generations. Paul, Timothy, the men that Timothy is discipling, and the men that they will disciple. So a four-generational mindset there in one verse, and what this tells us is that when we are making disciples, we are making disciples of Jesus, and he wants his disciples to be making disciples.

So that needs to be kept in mind. We are not making a group of sycophants, people who are like, oh you're amazing, you know, everything you say I think is great. We do not want to put ourselves in the position of being somebody's connection to God, you know, kind of serving as their priest, their mediator.

But we want to be edifying, encouraging, leading them on to Christ by means of the Word, through the power of the Spirit. So that's my first take on the question. I got to thinking about how I've.

Experienced it in the past, or ways that I've seen it done, and then looking kind of at the Bible, at the model, it seems like with the question, and I've seen this before, there's like this one-on-one, and we're gonna sit down and do this, but it seems like often it's in the context of kind of a natural growing, like in group things, someone's having a discussion, and bring something else up, and get to talking about it.

It seems like adding, Paul's bringing Tim along with him, and then Luke joins, and then Silas, and then there's more people involved, and they're all talking about these things that he says in the company of many witnesses.

And it seems like often when I think about of the discipleship that was most effective, it was the iron sharpening iron, it wasn't just like a one-on-one, although there's accountability there, but it seems like.

It organically happens in groups. Like when there's like some serious things going on, you see Jesus taking a disciple aside, right? Sometimes there's a reason for smaller groups, or even just one-to-one, but in the main, don't we see kind of, you know, here's 12 disciples, here's a handful of guys around Paul, and that's, in my experience, discipleship has always gone far better when there is like a small group of guys in the discipleship relation.

If it's just one-to-one, it's usually because there's a particular issue that needs to be worked out, and it's kind of like a serious focus, but that is generally not a sustainable long run. We are meant to be in groups.

Gangs. Gangs, exactly. Righteous gangs. Righteous mafia. Sorry, I just destroyed David. He was about to comment, but he went down, so I'll just say this. I've actually had somebody who was a member and attending a church I pastored just leave, because I did not give him one-to-one discipleship.

I didn't know exactly that's what he was asking for, but you know, we met, you know, maybe once, and I invited him to join in the group that we were already doing, but that wasn't, you know, he just wanted single attention only for long-term disciples, and I couldn't do that, just given the constraints.

You know, that's not something I was able to really do, and, you know, and he moved on, but I think David's ready now. Well, there's a,.

There was a principle in the Timothy and Paul relationship. He basically had a older pastor training a younger pastor to take over a church. Right. I mean, so there's, it's a good model. I mean, father and son, and if you have a, if you are a father and you have a son, you are discipling them, you know, one-on-one in a lot of, in a lot of ways.

You have that responsibility and that time, but what you just described is, well, maybe a small group, maybe a small group of men that you're pouring your heart into, or you join that small group of men.

That's something that is, in your opinion, more sustainable if you're outside of that family relationship, that immediate family, or that pastoral ministry. I'm actually training you to take over this church when I die.

Yeah, I'm not saying.

That you can't ever do one-to-one. Sometimes there's only one person interested, you know. Sometimes there's only one person interested. That's not really the main point of it, but usually Paul had more than just Timothy with him.

When he's talking to him, talking to Timothy, the things that I entrusted to you, but notice, it was in the presence of many witnesses, and also when Paul was only down to one companion, that was a burden to him, that he only had one guy with him left near the end of his ministry.

That was so abnormal for him, because normally there was a group. So I think that just talking about what the norm should look like, you know, one-to-one shows that either there is a serious issue with the person, they need some help, and you want to love them and encourage them.

Maybe there's a sin issue in their life, and you're doing the Matthew 18 thing, and they're willing to come and be reconciled and come back to Christ, and that's great. There might be a serious issue because there's a lack of hunger for the Word, and there's only one person interested in growing in Christ.

But I wouldn't say that that is a great sign if there's just one-to-one. And that.

Means that there could be a problem, you know, if it's one-to-one. But if you could design a good discipleship program in a local church, you'd have an older man in the faith training up a small group of younger men, you know.

I wouldn't want to say rival gangs, you know, these are the sharks and the jets. That's an old reference, and if you don't get it, shame on you. It's ages. I knew the theater guy would get it. From one generation to another.

Yes, but it's the question that is, you know, was asked if somebody comes to you and says, I'd like to be discipled. Yes. I mean, and that's unusual. Somebody comes up and says, this is what I want. But it does happen, you know.

So I guess you have one option. It says, we actually have a group of men in our church. They have a small group. This has a small group, you know, and you can join that small group. Perhaps that's something that if you don't have that in your.

Church, maybe you can start it. And sometimes when somebody wants to be discipled, that's not exactly what they ask, right? They don't come up to you and they don't really ask and try to invite themselves to a discipleship group and so on.

That's not how it's always expressed. Sometimes somebody will be talking about something that they're trying to understand, something I'm trying to study. I watched this debate or I heard this conversation and, you know, I didn't quite understand this or that.

Or they'll have some desire to serve in some way, but they need to get some training. The way that the need for discipleship comes up is not always phrased as a formal, hey, I need discipleship. I actually did that when I was in college.

I went to my pastor and said, I need you to disciple me because I want to be a preacher. I want to be a pastor. That was not something that was done. That was not something that he had done. That was not part of the church culture, the church family.

That was so far out of the ordinary. And I appreciated him saying yes. Of course, as a college kid, I'm like, I have no concept of how much time he has and doesn't have, how busy this guy is. Let's add something else to this.

Yes, exactly. I'm going to add something to your plate, okay? You know now, though. Yes, I do. But then, you know, he said, here's the time that I can meet. And I'm like, yes. Like, you know, I'm around your schedule and God had given me that desire.

You know, and that's something where if somebody does have the desire and you're a busy person, let them know what you can do. How much of.

The issues around discipleship are misconceptions of what discipleship actually is? Like you said earlier, somebody wanted to be disciple one-on-one and that doesn't always, it is actually abnormal probably to get that more often than within a group or within a gang, if you will.

And so, how much of the American notion of what discipleship is, it being a lot of one-on-one time or then, and this is one of the ways I've heard it before, put the disciple pursuing the disciple-y.

How much of it is a misconception of how much responsibility actually lies within the one who's being discipled? And is that something that we have a problem with in the church in the U .S.? Yes, so when you.

Look at Jesus, his discipleship one-on-one, Matthew chapter 10, and then the Synoptic Gospels have, you know, versions of that in theirs as well. But if you go read Matthew chapter 10, you see that Jesus addresses a variety of issues and it ranges all over from personal commitment to him, to having to deal with government officials, to, you know, what to expect, you know, all sorts of things.

Or how to conduct yourself when you're trying to do evangelism and strategies for when you enter a new city. Just a wide variety of subject matter. And you'll notice in the Gospels, he instructs them and then he tells them to get out there and do it.

You know, it's not simply a matter of, you know, we're just going to give you more and more information, you know, until you're really really informed and that makes you a great disciple. But there is an actual opportunity to put into practice the things that they were being taught.

So what are the expectations in the American context for discipleship and so on? It depends on the person. If they're in a situation where, you know, they just need counseling. Sometimes, in my experience, sometimes young men didn't have a father and they need some father time to fill in the gaps.

And their discipleship looks a lot like a practicalities about how to organize your day, and how to be diligent, and how to have a good attitude, and how to save your money, and things like that. That's discipleship.

You know, that's a godly need. But then also, it can't be something where it's just me and this guy. So, he has to be in the fellowship of the believers. He needs to be talking to more than just me. And so, sometimes in a counseling situation, like you know, I have a lot of issues I need to work out.

Sometimes it's not good for them to come back one-to-one because they get the therapeutic high. You know, I go to my counselor on a regular basis. I talk about my problems. I feel better when I leave.

Okay, that was great. That'll hold me over for another week. I'll come back and do that again. But it's the same type of positive emotional release people get from confessing to a priest. That doesn't actually change anything.

It's just like, I just feel better after I'm done. And why it's better to be discipled with a group of men is because there's more accountability there, not less. And there's more context there where you see, hey, I'm not unique in my problems, struggles, and sorrows.

You know, I'm not the center of my own unit. Look at all these other guys, and they all have this the same challenges and challenges greater than mine. And yet, here we all are, bowing the knee to Christ, want to hear from his Word together.

And that is.

Really, really helpful. You described some things that some people would call mentoring. You described some things that were just kind of teaching in general. You even described a scenario where you're singing behind a person and you're actually ministering to them.

All of that can be wrapped up into helping and serving the body. And that does help train up disciples. It does. You're ministering to one another. You're submitting one to another. You're doing all of those things out of love.

You're outdoing one another and showing honor. You know, all of these things. Treating one another is more important than yourself. Those are all good. But I think this particular question is talking about targeted development maturing.

How can or how should an older man target, through that kind of targeted effort, grow a small group of men. It's either one-on-one, maybe probably better with, you know, three to four, and help to mature, raise them up, so that they then can do the same thing.

They can also make disciples. That whole compound interest thing. Yes. So that way to bring us back.

To the actual question. It's always good. The main thing that should not happen is to create a dependence of this group of men on you when you're doing the discipling. You need to work yourself out of a job.

Okay, so how are they going to grow? Well, they're gonna grow by the Word of God. Christ washes his bride with the water of his Word. We do not live by bread alone, but every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

We are to long for the Word of God as infants desire the pure milk. How else are we going to grow except by turning to the Scriptures by the power of the Spirit to see what the Father says about the Son?

How else are we going to be transformed from glory to glory? How else are we going to be conformed to the image of the invisible God? There's no way into maturity into Christ except by the grace of God through the application and understanding of the Scriptures.

So the number one thing is helping to disciple them means to teach them how to read and study and understand and apply the Scriptures for themselves because we're all priests. I'm not a priest and then everybody else is the laity.

We're all priests and 1st John says you don't have need for a teacher, meaning it's not that you have to have someone conveying to you special knowledge and without them you're totally lost, but that you have been given an anointing which is the Holy Spirit is the sign and seal of the new covenant and so he is going to lead you through the Word of God, but then again you know you can be immature and in the Word, but you need to grow up.

Well what does that look like? By understanding the Scriptures and receiving them as they themselves tell you that they are to be received. So meditating on the Scriptures, you know Jesus teaches us to be serious with the verb tense.

You know, he says to the Sadducees, God didn't say I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, thus proving the resurrection to the Sadducees. We are to be concerned with the singular or plural as Paul says, you know, and the promise was to Abraham's seed, not to seeds, but to the one seed who is Christ.

So the Bible expects us to pay attention to grammar, to the case of the noun, the tense of the verb, and so on. Pay very, very close attention to the Scriptures expecting to see there what God says we should see there, who is his Son.

And so teaching men to study the Scriptures and to grow in the knowledge of the Word for the sake of applying it to the glory of God is primarily, that's the backbone, that's the backbone, you can't do without that.

If you don't have that, then you're not going to have lasting fruit in that discipleship relationship because they have got to be able to get to the point where they're feeding themselves the truth of the Word of God so that they can make disciples of others, right?

If they're just repeating stuff that they heard me say, that's not going to last four generations. But the Word of God stands forever. And the, like.

The, I think the word disciple, because you're talking about all of these things that might be daunting, specifically someone is asking, I need discipleship, they don't know where to start, they've got all these different things, showing them, having someone there, showing them your character, sharing your life with them, this is how I study.

If you've got a group, this is how this person studies, how this study. Yeah, there's all these things that we can learn to pay attention of, but let's kind of walk through it. And you're discipling them, you're teaching them a discipline of doing these different things.

And then going back to what you said about just filling your head with knowledge, again that character aspect of not just being hearers of the words, but doers of the Word. If you've got people around you who are asking you, okay, we talked about this, how are you applying it?

Or what are you going to do now? And even.

Practicing it in group, I know we've done this before in our Timothy school sessions, of how do we handle the Word of God? You know, and this can be taught in a variety of ways. I came across an instruction video just recently about a guy saying, here's how I highlight the text of Scripture, here's how I make notes, and it helps me pay attention to what's actually there in the text.

And it's a great system. I mean, it would take me forever to learn it, but if he's teaching that to men, so that it helps them pay closer attention to the text, to understand it better, and to be that much more equipped to put it into practice in their lives, hey, that's what that looks like.

There's not one special method of Bible study. I like the reductionistic definition of Bible study from Jerry Bridges, who described in his book Pursuit of Holiness, he said that Bible study is different from Bible reading only in this regard.

You read your Bible with a pad of paper and a pencil, and you're jotting down questions, or you're making observations as you go along, and all of a sudden you're studying the Bible. Now, you may not be studying it really well, but you are studying it, and that's a great start.

And then being taught how better to handle the Word of God. As I said, I mean, all the rules for Bible study are in the Bible. All the ways that we should be treating the Bible are given to us in the Bible.

I mean, the Bible is sufficient to tell us how to receive it, how to study it, how to meditate on it, how to apply it, so on. Going back to the.

Question, it talks about a process. It sounds like, instead of it being a one-size-fits-all, you're kind of discerning the person that's asking the question, what they need. Is it counseling? Is it how to do something?

Is it character? You know, you're kind of, and in that process, there is discipleship.

And it might be that when the person comes to you and says, I would like you to disciple me, the temptation is to be so flattered by that, that you don't send them to the person who should be discipling them, right?

So if there's a child in rebellion, I may be working with them for a little bit, but I'm sending them back to their parents. That's my whole goal. That's my whole aim. That's a great observation. And especially in a context where there's the egalitarian movement within churches, there is no chance on God's green earth that I should be discipling some other man's wife, right?

Amen. Like, so, no, I'm not, no, I'm not gonna disciple you. That's where you should do that. Question she should ask her husband first, anyway. Yes. And you go to that man and say. Yeah, why don't you go ask your husband who should disciple you?

And then ask him why he's not. Maybe I should disciple your husband, you know, something like that. But it may very well be that I can spend some time with you, I can pray with you, I can encourage you in the word, and so on.

But you might recognize in this person some giftings, some desires, some abilities that you realize that they would benefit by spending more time with so-and-so over here. And I am NOT the whole answer, because, hey, it's a church.

It's not one person. Like, if.

They're gifted in music, we might send them to somebody who's a part of the part of the music ministry. That's an older man who may be able to disciple them, or connect with them in those ways as well.

Yeah, somebody who has been.

Applying the scriptures in serving the church in music, and has a lot more meditation and application in play than I do. And some of this discipleship work, as Joe Boot says, we can't ecclesiasticize the Bible.

So it's only about church matters. So discipleship is, we're going to talk about theological things with theological terms. And this is all we're going to do. The Bible is for people in the church who go to church, and the Bible is for when we're at church.

That kind of discipleship ignores the fact that all authority has been given to Christ in heaven and on earth, go therefore. So the discipleship that needs to happen is robust, and it's wide, and maybe the person I'm discipling has a lot of issues regarding finances.

And we're going to be doing some discipling together, but then I'm going to send them to somebody else in the church who can work with them as well. And after all, I don't want as a pastor, or as in any other situation, I don't want as a pastor somebody at the church simply because of me.

God forbid. And in the same sense, I don't want somebody coming to church simply because of one other person in the church. That is not how the body grows. That's not how the body is knit together. So discipleship, we get the idea of the master-sensei, one-on-one, and that's it.

But in the Scriptures, it's far more entangled in a good way.

Amen. I think that about wraps up that discussion on that question. And thank you again, Joe, for sending that in, because that was a very profitable discussion, and we all enjoyed it very much. But now we'll go on to what we recommend for this week.

So we'll start with you, Michael. I'm going to recommend.

Three books in one, because that's how I read them. But the three books by Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Was There, Escape From Reason, and then the third book, He Is There And He Is Not Silent. And I had no idea what I was in for when somebody recommended this to me, and I read through it.

And his writings have only become all the more important the farther into paganism and postmodernism we go. So highly, highly recommend you reading this trilogy by Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Was There, Escape From Reason, and He Is There And He Is.

Not Silent. I recommend, there's a short series on Canon called Raising Trouble, Parenting Kids To Love The Standard. Spoiler, the standard is Christ. That's not a spoiler. I'm assuming that. The whole thing, yeah.

No, it was really good, and it breaks it down into stages of parenting, so like infants in elementary and high school, and all of that. And it was really helpful in talking about general principles, and he does focus on children, but he also focused on our attitudes as parents.

He talks about forgiveness, you know, when we fall short, being joyful, things like discipline, what that can look like in the different stages. And I just found it very encouraging and very helpful. I'm currently doing a bunch of.

University studies, so the type of stuff that I'm consuming other than the things that I'm trying to bring forward for the brothers is probably not good for a wider audience. But what I will say is, if you're tasked to do something and you don't know how to do it, maybe read about how to do it properly, or talk to someone about that.

Don't assume that you know it all. I completed, finished a book last.

Week. It's a modern-day classic now. It's by Thomas Stanley. It's called The Millionaire Next Door, and it is a, just really in the last 25 years, it's become the quintessential study on millionaires in the United States.

And he was the largest study at the time. He's actually updated it, I think the 2010s, 2012. Unfortunately, he died in 2015, and his daughter has taken some of his notes and has done like the next millionaire next door.

But the classic version, it works. And that's kind of his whole point, that the principles that he's putting forth are not universal. They just are. I think the surveys that he sent out in the mid -90s to late -90s, I was just saying, how did you become a millionaire?

And the statistics are, it's amazing. There's a lot of graphs, there's a lot of charts and stuff in there as well, but it reads like a novel. And he said like 78 of all current millionaires didn't inherit a dime.

He talks about how the second and third generation of people, like the first generation immigrants and the second generation learned industry, thrift, living below your means, and not being what they say in Texas, big hat, no cattle, where you are looking like you're rich.

He says, for the most part, most rich people don't look like they're rich. They're wealthy because they live below their means, save their money, and work really well with their spouse. And just these principles that he keeps bringing forward, one of the best pieces of financial advice I was ever given was, stay married to your first wife.

It's just true. And you have a good partner in that. They just grew their family's wealth. And most of them did it when they make less than six figures. So these principles that he puts forth, as I was reading through it, I was like, that's a biblical principle.

You're spending money on things that matter, but you're not wasting things. You're not buying stuff to impress people that you don't like and probably don't like you. And just budgeting, living below your means.

It was really neat to read about this, that most people that actually have built that level of wealth or that level of capital have done it slowly over time. And I'm like, hmm, there's proverbs, go to the end, you're sluggard.

Not these, get rich, get rich kind of quick. And he gave some warnings to parents about giving a bunch of money to your kids, not training them with the same level of discipline that you had. These things, their lessons were hard learned.

And sometimes they forget to teach them to their kids or to their grandkids. So I enjoyed the books, Millionaire Next Door. It is a modern classic, and I hope you enjoy it too.

Thank you for that. My recommendation this week is to familiarize yourself with AI tools. Whether they are something that you can implement in your own work or productivity, try and find something that's out there because there are things being built that can double, triple your productivity in many ways.

So try and go out there and be a front runner on these technologies that are being developed because you've lived through any sort of technological advancement and you were behind the eight ball on all of them just out of fear.

I would say do not fear AI tools because you are the imager of God. AI is not. You have the imagination. AI does not have the imagination. And you are supposed to be using these tools to your advantage.

So if you would go out there and find something that can help you, something that can multiply your productivity and build your household well. We'll move on to what are we thankful for, Michael?

I am thankful for the opportunity to make disciples. I was a bit overcome and blessed this last Sunday. We had a room full of men at Timothy School. It started back for the fall semester and there was just a moment of, I suppose, reflection or clarity that the reason, you know, it's all the grace of God, but why am I sitting in a room full of men in this discipleship moment?

How did it come to this? How is it that we are being so blessed together with this discipleship? And I recalled the faithful labor of men who roped me in, said, you come on, we're having this, we're meeting together.

We're going to be studying the word together. You be a part of this. And I was, I was sitting in the, in the seat that others are now sitting in, but it was because they did that discipleship work and they made that a priority and they taught me what that looked like.

And as I reflect upon that, I'm just thankful for the way which Jesus has arranged for the growth of his saints through that process. And I was.

Just very blessed. I am thankful for time with my children. This past month, there's been several weekends where I've been the sole caretaker of the children. So I had them to myself and I work during the day.