Transformation Tuesday: Who are you meeting with for discipleship?

This week’s post is not a video but a question: Who are you discipling or who is discipling you?

Before the church begins officially in the book of Acts, Jesus trains twelve men to be the leaders of this new entity. Then he sends the twelve (his disciples) out to make more disciples. Those disciples then make new disciples throughout the Mediterranean world. The letters that Paul writes are not written to an undefined crowd; they are written to very specific people, many of whom are named in the letters. The point is that training was happening between individuals, and that is how the church was equipped to continue preaching and making more disciples.

The stated mission of BBC is to “make disciples.” The church is many, many, things. It’s a place for growth and Christian community. But it’s primarily a group of people who, through worship, and the Word, and preaching, become disciples who are equipped to make more disciples. If you are a young believer, you should be seeking out older, wiser believers to disciple you. Ask them! Learn everything you can from them. If you are not a new believer, you should be actively seeking out younger believers so you can disciple them.

What the church needs most is people who are mature enough to disciple other people. When lives are changed through the preaching of the Word, those changed lives become a sermon themselves. When people come into our church, they should see a group of people who do not live according to the lies of our culture, but people who are actively trying to apply the Word of God to all things, both public and private.

There are new believers who get off track because they are never discipled in the basics. There are middle-aged believers who are stagnated because they stopped giving over time and energy to other people, and there are older believers who, sadly, wait to be served instead of serving with all the wisdom that should come with old age. These are all tragedies, and they happen when we forget what it means to be a disciple.

A disciple is someone who has left everything to follow Christ, and Christ commands his disciples to go and make other disciples. That is our mission. We should always be looking around and asking, “Who needs to be discipled”? In whatever activity we are involved in, we are asking ourselves, “How can I make disciples through this?”

A disciple-making mindset will keep us from mindlessly wasting our time, and it will keep us in the Word and in prayer. When we are constantly taking in information, we feel confident and proud, but trying to change the mindset of just one human individual will reveal how totally inadequate we really are. We have Christ’s instructions, and He has given us the Spirit and all authority to make disciples, so we will have to lean hard on Him.

Soon we will do a short series in Sunday School on discipleship and evangelism, which will give us some basic training in how to get started, but being a disciple and making disciples will require a lifetime of learning.

Believers, do not stagnate in your Christian life. Always be imitating others as they follow Christ and always be discipling someone else.