Kwasizabantu Ministers' Conference

3 – 6 March 2003

INTRODUCTION

I would like to invite you to reflect on what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

This question is very important to us because as Christian, it stands at the heart of our life, of our ministry.

It determines the way we are going to interact with people around us.

And the way we are going to cope with a world that is being shaken by major events.

Jesus said in Matthew 28,19:

Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations,

baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.

In this passage, Christ is telling his disciples that they are the entity through which he will be present and do his work on earth.

-So the task of the church is to be a living testimony to Christ.

- and so to make disciples of all the nations, i.e. to reproduce itself in the various cultures of the world.

2- a disciple is made through

-being baptised

-and being taught to obey "all that I have commanded you."

The vitality, strength, the effectiveness, and even the survival of the church depends on its ability to make disciples.

So, it is very important to understand

-What is a disciple

-How does a person become a disciple

-How is a disciple trained, i.e. How can a disciple be taught to obey the word of Christ.

These are the three points we will develop now.

I- WHAT IS A DISCIPLE

A person who follows a master, learn from him, carry on his work and thoughts.

The disciple career, is characterized by:

-A beginning. The person gets into the training process.

-The training process itself.

-The goal to reach: to become like the master. Luke 6,40.

The word disciple has a dynamic aspect: it includes the idea of change, evolution, progress, aiming at, striving towards something.

In churches we use mostly the word Christian (who is of Christ, who belongs to Christ).

This word is right, but it does not reflect the same dynamic aspect.

It describes more a static position. Something that we have reached, that we already possess, that we rest on.

This maybe explain the lack of emphasis in the church to make disciples, and so our poverty in this area.

When parents bring forth a child, their main concern is that he may grow so as to become a full-grown adult.

This should also be the concern of the local church for all its member.

II- HOW TO BECOME A DISCIPLE

1- From all nations

Now the disciples come from all nations.

-This implies that the one to whom I am preaching the gospel is not like me.

-He may have a different culture; He may belong to a different social circle;

-And he certainly has a different personality. So I have to take this fact into account.

Now how do we handle these differences as we obey God's command to make disciples of all nations.

Would we fear to be defiled or to have our Christianity polluted through the contact with someone different from us,

As Peter when he went to Cornelius's house.

The right way is to behave like Paul when he says in 1 Cor 9,20.

To the Jews I became like a Jew to win the Jews.

To those under the law I became like one under the law

So as to win those under the law.

I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.

The story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman shows us how to properly handle these differences. We ought to:

-Be servant to the person, i.e., be respectful of the person;

. Give him the value that God gives him as a human being, regardless of who he is or what he does.

- Use an incarnated message to reveal Jesus to him:

. A message which addresses his life-situation,

. A message expressed in terms of his socio-cultural elements, so that it may speak to him; so that he may understand it.

Why ? Because the life-situation of a person is related to the way God has prepared for the person to come to know him.

- Teach the person the truth and not our way of doing things or our way of living Christianity. Otherwise, we might put unnecessary yokes on him.

Example: Jesus and the Samaritan women

Jesus didn't tell the woman to spent time in prayers in the desert as he does.

Rather he told her that the location where we worship God doesn't matters.

What really matters is to adore God in spirit and in truth, i.e., with our heart and in the right way.

2- Conversion

According to Christ, the disciple's life starts by being baptised in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

"In the name…" is not a magic formula. It means:

-in agreement with God; according to God's will and authority; through God's action.

It may also mean being immersed in who God is, into God’s nature.

-that all the Trinity is involved in the work of salvation.

Now, we all know that baptism is the external sign for conversion which consists in

-turning away from, renouncing worldly things and turning to Jesus.

-dying to self and to the world in order to live in Christ.

So conversion is the beginning of the disciple's life,

-the entrance in the training process,

-the enrolment at the school of disciples.

And we can say that evangelism is a call to become a disciple of Christ.

3- First allegiance

Now a person get converted by God's grace which usually operates as follows:

-The person find himself in a situation of need or dissatisfaction which leads him to reflect on his state, to look for something better and to be open to listen.

- Then person hears God's word addressing his situation.

-And the Holy Spirit uses this word to convince the person about what is wrong and what is right, and to lead him to accept Christ.

At this stage, the person accepts Christ at a very basic level because:

The person does not know much about Jesus.

So he can still be doing things that are not correct.

He can still be doing many mistakes.

Unfortunately, in churches we have so little follow-up on new converts that we have come to think that everything must take place at conversion.

So we hold that for a person to be converted he must know almost everything that the Scriptures say.

Or must he have his life totally changed.

So we overfeed them with biblical knowledge.

Or we tend to moralize on their behaviour.

We overload them with ethics which very often have more to do with our culture rather than with what Jesus commanded.

We tell them that if you don't do this and this, or dress like this, you cannot be a Christian.

Because our main concern is often to be religiously correct.

To appears as a group of nice people.

But by doing so, we get superficial Christians, disciples who are not efficient because.

-Either they speak about the things of God, but do not really know him.

-Or they make superficial changes in their behaviour. So they end up mixing the old way of the world and the new way of Christianity.

When a person accepts to follow Christ, this acceptance is usually very basic

And we must have this fact in mind.

For example, let us take a look at Jesus' disciples. When they were called, they were all but perfect

-The Scriptures tell us that they left everything and followed Jesus

-But at time goes by, we see them doing mistakes.

-Even during the last supper, they were concerned about finding who is the greatest among them. And one of them had gone out to betray his master.

All this after three years of training by Jesus Christ himself.

-And after the crucifixion , they went back to their former occupations.

We may also reflect on Our own example.

-There are things that we understood only later, sometime, after many years.

-There are changes in our lives that we did only after many years.

-All this shows how important is the follow-up after conversion,

-i.e. the importance of the training process after the person has become a disciple.

-We hear about millions of people who get converted during evangelistic campaigns

But afterwards, we don't hear about them anymore why ?

In most of the cases, it is because they didn't have the proper follow-up.

-So it is really a matter of life or death. me must learn how to train effective disciples.

For it is during this time that deep changes take place,

And that the person becomes a soldier of Christ, ready to accomplish any good work.

True changes in lives do not come from men's will or men's effort.

They do not come from the fear of men or from the fact of trying to please men.

They rather come from the work of the Holy Spirit who uses the word of God

-To convince about sin so as to affect the person in such a way that he repents and makes the necessary changes in his life.

4- About baptism

Before we move on, we need to answer a question related to the fact of becoming a disciple.

i.e., when should then a person be baptized ?

The church has been answering to this question in three ways:

- The person is baptized at the conversion manifested by the fact that he renounces all known sins and turn to Christ.

-The person is baptized after his conversion and after he has been taught for a certain time, this in order to make sure that his conversion is not a fake one.

-The church waits to see if the conversion is going to last, if the new born baby will die or survive as time goes by, and this without any attempt to take care of him.

This third way is not good at all. The church ought to care for a new convert even if one decides not to do the baptism right away.

IV- HOW TO TRAIN A DISCIPLE

Once the person has become a disciple, his training is done by teaching him to obey "all I have commanded you."

The questions we need to deal with now are:

-How to teach.

-Who does the teaching.

-Where does the teaching take place.

How to teach

1- One way consists in sending people to Bible Institute or Seminaries. But

-A very small amount of people can go to academic institutes.

-Most academic institutes are concerned with giving academic knowledge rather than training disciples.

This academic knowledge is of course necessary, especially for those who plan to be in full time ministry. And they must pursue it. But it is not enough to make disciples.

This is so true that some Biblical schools are reviewing their teaching methods with the aim to increase the teaching in spirituality and include the training of disciples.

So we end up with the same problem which has only been moved from the church to a Biblical school.

2- Now in churches the way widely used to train disciples consists in immersing the person in the assembly.

With the hope that he would grow through the preaching, the Bible studies and the various activities of the church.

But unfortunately what happens is that some years later, he has indeed grown but so little.

That he cannot hold a leadership position, nor can he be an effective witness.

So we end up with churches filled by what someone called dead wood.

Churches full of baptized pagan as Prof Buys said yesterday.

There is no doubt that we must bring new converts in the congregation, but this alone is not enough to make disciples because:

-The person is not urged to desire to grow.

-He gets knowledge and even learn how to put it into practice.

But this does not necessarily lead the him to practice what he have learned.

3- Another way of teaching is based on learning methods or techniques.

Techniques for praying, for Bible study, for evangelisation, for church planting and church growth.

I myself have been teaching church growth and church planting.

And I can say that methods can be very helpful, but the best method of the world won't work if we do not have a relationship with the Master.

Example: Peter and his partners in Luke 5

They knew all the techniques of fishing.

But it is only at Jesus' word that they were successful in their business.

We see now that there are two things that are at the heart of the teaching of a disciple; it is:

-A relationship with the Master.

- And the learning of a new way of life.

These two things are related: It is from our relationship with Christ that flows a new way of living.

Who teaches

Jesus tells his disciples to "go and make disciples of all the nations."

So the disciples are trained by other disciples who have reached a certain degree in maturity.

Paul said something similar to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2,2:

And what you have heard from me before many witnesses, entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach to others also.

So in the church, each person is a disciple.

An equation must be made between being a member and being a disciple.

And those who have become mature are in charge of training other while they continue their own training.

Now what should be the state of mind of the person in charge of training others.

Paul said to the Corinthians in 1Cor 11,1: Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ.

So, the trainer does not teach the people to follow him, but rather to follow Christ.

His function is to be an example, a sign which shows the way that leads to Jesus.

He models what life in Christ looks like and teach other how to live this same life.

In fact, it is God himself who train the disciples and he uses the trainer as an instrument in this regard.

So the task of the trainer is to find out what the Lord is doing in the life of a trainee, in order to act according to God's will and so help the trainee to be more Christ-like.

Where to teach

The teaching of a disciple can be made:

-In an informal way: i.e., in the various life-situations as people are involved in their daily activities.

-In the formal way: Here we need some kind of structure. Here is an example of structure which can be used:

One person is in charge of training about twelve people at the maximum.

And the trainer meet with each of his trainees on a regular basis.

The trainer and all his trainees may also just meet in a small group on a regular basis.

Whether it is a small group of 2 people or a small group of about 12 people.

The small group will give to people the opportunity to get into the work. Something that cannot be done in a large assembly.

And this is important because we can see someone doing a job and even understand everything that he does. But as long as we ourselves have not tried to do the same, we do not really know how to do that job.

Now, in churches there are usually various kinds of groups: groups for prayer, Bible study, evangelisation, mutual support, etc.

And that is good. But these are the means and not the goals.

We need groups that would use all these means for this one purpose:

-To become Christ-like.

-To live in and through Jesus.

-To receive and live and share God's life.

-To learn God's word and apply it to present life situations.

These are the kind of groups for discipleship we are talking about.

These small groups may be organized in a treelike model:

-The pastor trains about twelve people.

-And after they have reached a certain level, each of these twelve people will train twelve other members, and so on.

V- KEY ELEMENTS IN THE DISCIPLE'S LIFE

Jesus told us to teach the disciples all I have commanded you.

So the disciple need to be taught how to come to know all that the Lord has commanded us.

And he need to learn how to obey it.

The disciple's aim is then a deep relationship with God through which God's given life would flow in and through him.

To achieve this goal, he has to use some key elements.

1- Loving God

Jesus said in John 15,4: Abide in me, and I will abide in you.

The relationship Jesus wants us to have with him is defined as follows:

I in him and He in me.

All that is mine is his and all that is his is mine.

We cannot attain this state just by setting good morals or good ethics in our life.

Rules may be good, but sometimes they become the worst enemy of faith.

Because we end up caring more about keeping our rules

Rather than caring about God's will

Only one thing can allow us to reach this goal: we must fall in love with Jesus-Christ.

Luke 10:25-27 tells us that the love for God is the source of eternal life, i.e., of divine life.

It is the energy that will power our Christian life.

In his attempt to understand what love is, a Christian writer said that there are four levels for love.

-First level: the person loves himself. It is the selfish love found in the world.

-Second level: the persons loves God for what God can do for him.

The person who becomes a disciple is very often at this level. Unfortunately, many Christians stay at this level for years and never get out of it.

-Third level: we love God for who he is. We are captivated by God.

-Fourth level. We forget about ourselves and give ourselves up to God's love.

How can we get to this fourth level ? How can we be filled with the love for God.

We must feed ourselves on God's word, on the revelation of God.

It is who god is that leads us to love him.

And as we eat the word of God.

-We become aware of our poverty in God.

-We come to cry out to God about it so as to let him no rest until he fills us with his love.

The more we cry out to God, the more we die to self,

i.e., the more we empty ourselves and offer to God all the space in our life.

God then start revealing himself to us.

And at this point we must go ahead and start living by what God is showing us as we feed ourselves on his word.

And God will add to it according to what he said in Mark 4,25: Whoever has will be given more.

As we grow in God's love, we trust God more and more.

We come to seek his presence; we long to be with him.

We long to listen and talk to him, to be filled with him and to live through him.

These things become our delight, our source of joy.

And we start desiring the things that God desires, and hating the things that he hates.

2- Turning away from

When a person get converted, he turns away from all known sins.

As he grows in God's love, he keeps turning away from all sins for which he is being convinced by the Spirit of God.

So he does this because he comes to realized that there are better things, there is a more excellent way in God.

And that the things he have been following before are vain.

What do we turn away from ? usually from our own way of living, our own desires.

The things that we used to value before, the way we used to see or consider people.

But it may also involve leaving some things in the physical sense.

For example all those things or even those people who tend to pull us back from Jesus.

The turning away from something wrong may require a struggle.

And there are two things that we should keep in mind in this regard:

-We must never give up. God said in the Bible: can a man fall and rise up no more ? The answer is of course no.

Unless he is dead. But God was speaking here to people who were alive, although not very well;

-We must never lower, or twist, or adapt to our own convenience God's requirements. God said in Isaiah 4,20: Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.

It is better for us if we do wrong things to just knowledge it before God

Rather than to try to change God's word on our behalf.

3- Giving everything to Jesus

-The love for God leads us to give to Jesus all that we are and that we have.

-This means that we are no longer anything on our own; and we no longer possess anything on our own.

This is more a state of mind that we should have.

I still have my body, but I know that it belongs to Jesus.

I still have my house, or my car, but these belong to Jesus.

He is the One who decides what to do with it.

And I am there just to do what he wants me to do with it.

The problem is that, when we find ourselves in this situation.

We tend to go and take back from time to time what we gave to Jesus.

And use it according to our own will, and then give it again to Jesus.

When we give everything to Jesus, what we should rather do is to lay hold of everything that is Jesus' and let it become our possession, our everything.

And if we do that, we will now depend on him.

So we have to look to him and wait on him for everything.

a- The love of God leads us to continually be with him, to continually set our mind on him.

-In order to learn who he is, what he does, how he acts.

And to identify ourselves with what he has given us, with what he tells us we are in him.

-In his presence we also learn to apply to all our life-situations what he gives us, i.e., we learn to live by his life, by his divine purposes.

b- Now, God may not show us all his will for a certain situation.

Specially when we still do not know him very well.

God may allow us to have a correct knowledge of what he plans to do.

In order to leads us to act according to his will, although this knowledge is not accurate.

Example: Abraham and Isaac.

When he was called to sacrify his son, we are told in Hebrew 11,19.

-Abraham thought that God would raise him from the dead after he had killed him.

-This vision of the situation allowed him to obey God's will. But we know that this is not what actually took place.

c- Also, as a disciple we must expect to go through trials as we do God's will.

We will be tested, we will need to fight and overcome in Christ.

Because it is through this process that God's given life becomes part of us, part of our nature.

d- God may use us also to give his blessing to people who are going thru difficulties but do not know him.

To do this, God takes us and put us together with these people.

So we find ourselves facing the same hard situation that these people are facing.

With the difference that we know God and so we are able to live by God's life in the situation.

This opens the way for God to come in the situation, to destroy the works of the devil, to bless everybody and to reveal himself to the people.

This is what intercession is all about.

In fact this is something similar to what Jesus did for us when he came to save us.

So as a disciple we should expect to go through a kind of type, a kind of illustration

Of the death and the resurrection of Christ.

This is what Paul meant when he said in 2 Cor 4:11.

For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.

4-Being thankful to God

Because we have learned that God acts on our behalf,

We are able to knowledge him in everything and thank him for everything.

This prevents us to think that things are done through our human efforts,

Or to take the glory for what the Lord is doing.

Now, we thank God:

-Not in a mechanical way.

-But because we have come to understand God purposes.

Or simply because he has given us his peace for what we are going through.

This is not always automatic and sometimes, like Habakkuk, we may have to struggle before we reach this state where we just rest on God.

5- Some concluding remarks

Never stop following God. It is harder to come back once we have departed from him.

God allows things in our lives to make us grow in him and share his life with other. So

-Every moment of life is an opportunity to be with him and learn from him.

-Every event is an opportunity to become Christ-like, i.e., to feed ourselves on the death and the life of Christ.

We must always remember that God takes care of our needs. But above all he wants to give us his life, to make become his full-grown children.

So he acts to achieve this goal.