by jimwalton » Wed Mar 21, 2018 3:51 pm
Jesus's disciple-making strategy was to spend time together so that he could teach people what it meant to know God, to love God with your whole heart, to love people and serve them. Some of his teaching was from the Torah, but some of it was just information about God along with how we are supposed to live as a result. That's the core of what discipleship is: Spending time with a mentor so that his/her lifestyle, values, and wisdom is caught by you. Nowadays since we have the whole Bible, there's a lot of information to be had by studying it. But one can't become a fully-devoted disciple just by reading a book. We only learn the hard and the harder lessons in the furnace of life. That's where we learn how to love hard-to-love people, how to forgive when the hurt has been intense, how to be patient and kind in the face of adversity, how faith is refined by difficult experiences, and how to really know God when He's hard to detect.
So what I'm saying is that discipleship is both mentoring and meditation, both relationships and reading. While we can disciple ourselves in certain areas (God works with us as individuals), we also benefit from the examples of other people and the wisdom they can convey.
> What do we do once we have made a disciple? What do they do next?
After you have made a disciple, go make another one, all the while still growing in your own faith (2 Tim. 2.2). And what do they do? They should go make a disciple of someone while they continue to grow in their faith. It's a continual and unbroken chain of life.
Jesus's disciple-making strategy was to spend time together so that he could teach people what it meant to know God, to love God with your whole heart, to love people and serve them. Some of his teaching was from the Torah, but some of it was just information about God along with how we are supposed to live as a result. That's the core of what discipleship is: Spending time with a mentor so that his/her lifestyle, values, and wisdom is caught by you. Nowadays since we have the whole Bible, there's a lot of information to be had by studying it. But one can't become a fully-devoted disciple just by reading a book. We only learn the hard and the harder lessons in the furnace of life. That's where we learn how to love hard-to-love people, how to forgive when the hurt has been intense, how to be patient and kind in the face of adversity, how faith is refined by difficult experiences, and how to really know God when He's hard to detect.
So what I'm saying is that discipleship is both mentoring and meditation, both relationships and reading. While we can disciple ourselves in certain areas (God works with us as individuals), we also benefit from the examples of other people and the wisdom they can convey.
> What do we do once we have made a disciple? What do they do next?
After you have made a disciple, go make another one, all the while still growing in your own faith (2 Tim. 2.2). And what do they do? They should go make a disciple of someone while they continue to grow in their faith. It's a continual and unbroken chain of life.