“JESUS THE GREATEST DISCIPLE-MAKER OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY”
What word is used more often in the New Testament than any other word to define and describe a follower of Christ? How would you answer that question? Would your choice be the word “saint”? To be sure, that is a prominent and important word to describe a follower of Christ, and needs much, much study by all followers of Christ to see who we are in Christ and what God expects us to be. But that is not the most prominent word used in the New Testament to describe a Christian.
Then, would you choose the word “servant”? Again, this is a very important word, and one which needs to be examined and implemented on a daily basis in every Christ-follower’s life. What a revolution would occur within the individual life as well as within the church, and the impact would show up as a penetrating influence in society at large if each Christian practiced servant-hood as a regular vocation. But the word “servant” is not the word used most often in the New Testament.
Would it be the word “Christian”? Any student of the Bible should not have difficulty here. It is shocking to some followers to discover that the word “Christian” is used only three times in the entire Bible, and that there is substantial evidence for believing that all three of those references refer to the analysis of unbelievers, cynics or enemies of the Gospel. So the word “Christian” is not the word we are searching for.
The word that is used most often in the New Testament to define and describe a follower of Christ is the word “disciple”. Judging by the way the Christian community has either ignored or overlooked this word, that fact should raise the eyebrows of serious followers of Christ. The word “disciple” occurs some 269 times in the first five books of the New Testament! Furthermore, Jesus used the word far more than anybody else did. Also, He both modeled and mandated the making of disciples. This is a powerful indication of His primary strategy in reaching the world with His Gospel and His salvation.
The next important question is, Then exactly what is a “disciple”? This question and its answer cannot be researched too many times. Here is a simplified answer: “A disciple is one who follows as he learns, and always learns more as he continues following.” If you had to choose which word of the two main verbs is dominant in that definition, which would you choose—the word “follow” or the word “learn”? Again, the answer will fool you. The dominant idea in the word “disciple” is the idea of learning. By definition, the word means “a learner,” and the following is an inevitable result of full and proper learning. Having said that, let me state an axiom about following. No one can be a follower without being (literally) on the move, or mobile, and the more aggressive the leader, the more active the follower. If your devotion does not move you to great dedication, accurate direction, and the willingness to TRAVEL (read the Book of Acts) substantial distances, it can hardly be claimed that it follows Jesus or the early Christians. Brothers and sisters in Christ, be sure to apply this rule to yourself, thus testing your relationship with Jesus Christ.
Now, let me construct a more technical definition of a “disciple,” a definition that more satisfactorily exposes the full spiritual anatomy of a Christian disciple. “A Christian disciple is a born-again believer in Christ who lives in transition by dynamically adapting himself to each new Christian truth that reaches him.” Friends, that is a radical statement, but not as radical yet as the full understanding of the word “disciple”! Note three factors in the definition: (1) A follower of Christ must be “born again”; it is not possible to be a true follower of Christ without the new birth. (2), Then, that born-again follower is to live in a constant state of changing for the better. This means that the Christian life is only truly lived by people who are always and forever “on the grow.” The Christian life is a moving target, and the Christian must be moving at the God-ordained pace of growth before he can live it. (3) This constant change takes place in the Christian by the dynamic adapting of himself to each new Christian truth that reaches him. So the ongoing change of his life is vital and dynamic and occurs through constant adaptation of his mind, his character, his conduct and lifestyle, to any new truth God gives to him. “The reward for proper response to Divine light is the increase of Divine light; the penalty for ignoring any light God gives is increasing darkness.” So, already the concept of a “disciple” is much larger than we normally think.
A disciple, then, is an apprentice. If you had approached Jesus during His Incarnation and asked him, “How are we to think of you?” He might have answered, “Just think of Me as My Father’s apprentice, because I have spent all of eternity past catching and matching My Father’s mind and heart and learning His ‘trade’”—the marks of an apprentice. You see, it takes a disciple to make a disciple, and Jesus never “broke stride” when He came into time and history. Since He had logged eternity past being a disciple (Isaiah 50:4-8, NASV). He would automatically build disciples during His time on earth. We can derive from this the truth that no one can be a true disciple of Christ without building other disciples—that is the nature of ‘the Contract’! That is the only Command in the Commission! A person who is not an intentional disciple-maker in pursuit of the Model and the Mandate of Jesus is simply not the disciple called for in the New Testament.
Also, a disciple is, by definition, a scholar. To make this vivid, let me ask you to engage in a project the next time you attend a church service. Look to your right and left to every person in every seat on your row, and ask yourself the question, “Is that person (that person, that person, etc., etc.) a Bible scholar? Is that person a Jesus-scholar? Could that person explain the Biblical doctrine of propitiation? Or the vital doctrine of imputation?” Embarrassing, isn’t it? But that is the necessary definition of the key word of the New Testament in defining a Christian, the word “disciple” (student, pupil, scholar).
Then, a “disciple” is an understudy. That is, a disciple is a Christian who has placed himself in voluntary subordination or submission to another Christian (usually one who is considerably more advanced than he) in order to drain that expertise from the discipler into the disciple by relationship, teaching, training, repetition, assignment, accountability, etc. The disciple literally “studies under” the discipler.
So what is the main discipline of a disciple? Strange as it will seem to many conventional Christians, the main discipline of a disciple is study. By definition, a disciple is eager to learn. A New Testament disciple is expected to maintain a student attitude throughout his life on earth after his rebirth in Christ. This “student profile” calls for him to be a regular attendant in the required “classes,” a notetaker who retains in writing the truth so that he can study it again and again, and a practical model of the things he is learning. What parent of a first-grader would send him to school without a notebook, pencil, and other materials, and expect him to return in time with a textbook and assignments, etc.? Every Christian should see himself as a lifetime student in the school of Christ, following the same vocational regimen as a serious student in school.
Last Friday night (July 11, 2008), the world medical community lost one of its greatest pioneers. Dr. Michael DeBakey, perhaps the greatest pioneer in world history in the field of cardiovascular surgery, died at the age of 99. Dr. DeBakey was the inventor of a host of devices that are now commonly used in heart surgeries, pioneering such now-common procedures as bypass surgery. In fact, in his older years, Dr. DeBakey’s life was saved—twice—by medical devices that he himself had invented! Dr. DeBakey performed over 60,000 heart surgeries during his 70-year career. His patient list reads like an international “Who’s Who?” A great number of kings and presidents, as well as international celebrities, were on the list. But one fact stands out to me in portraying the real Michael DeBakey and in chronicling the thing that enabled him to become the incredible man he was. Michael DeBakey read the entire vast Encyclopedia Brittanica straight through, from the earliest “A” entry to the last “Z” entry—before he ever entered college!!! Friends, this is story of a man who only worked with organic, temporary, perishable hearts, while we Christians work with spiritual, eternal, heaven-bound or hell-bound hearts, human hearts that will either relate to God or choose to “fly solo” into eternity, and yet, we show little of the vocational devotion to study and preparation that he showed! If we are to be real disciples of Christ, we must develop a passion for learning of Him, His truth, His purpose and His strategy. “Take my yoke (a vocational disciple’s word) upon you, and learn of Me,” said Jesus (Matthew 11:29). Apparently, Jesus meant, “Learn about Me” as your Subject; and “Learn from Me” as your Teacher. In disciple-making terms, a yoke is an instrument of identification as well as an instrument of involvement. Both of these words, identification and involvement, are key words in the disciple-making process.
I have another question for you: Who were the two greatest disciple-makers of Christian history? Without question, they were Jesus and the Apostle Paul. Jesus will always remain the greatest disciple-maker, but after 2,000 years of Christian history, the second name I have mentioned should have been displaced by some even more productive Christian (indeed, by many such). I am not talking about preaching, evangelizing, church building, etc., the usual activities which measure productivity in our thinking. I am talking about something that includes those activities and many more—the making of disciples. In this study, we will confine our attention to Jesus as a disciple-maker.
In considering Jesus as a disciple-maker, how do we estimate and evaluate Him in that role?
A. His Ministry
First, we may consult His ministry. We normally think of Jesus’ ministry in terms of healing, teaching and preaching. But there was one activity that overshadowed and overwhelmed even those vital ministries in Jesus’ life. Of course, it was the ministry of disciple-making. It is the concensus of Christian scholarship (and I definitely agree, though the figure may be too small) that Jesus spent 85% of the time of His public ministry with twelve men. What a strange inconsistency to appearance! He came “to save sinners” (I Timothy 2:15), to “seek and to save those who were lost” (Luke 19:10), to “bear witness to the truth” (John 18:37)—and yet He spent 85% of His time of public ministry with twelve men! What a strange enigma! What a puzzle! Only one valid conclusion can be reached, and that is that Jesus’ primary strategy was not ministry to the masses, though He did that wonderfully. It was not social influence, though His influence has been vast and permanent. It was not mere soul-winning, though He was the master soul-winner (if you disagree with this, just think of how many He left unreached if His master-motive was soul-winning).
Please do not be among those who deliberately misquote me to mean what I neither say nor mean. I am not in any way depreciating any or all of those vital ministries—mass, or crusade evangelism; social ministry; soul-winning, etc. I have spent plenty of time personally doing “mass” evangelism. I just returned this week from the very spot where, nine years ago, I witnessed the miraculous believing response (response to the invitation to trust Christ and be saved) of some 8,000 people (the estimate of the pastor of Eldoret Valley Baptist Church) in an open field at the edge of Eldoret, Kenya in a three-day spontaneous crusade. I was reminded once and again in the last three weeks in Eldoret by observers to that unplanned event who were present during those three miraculous days of “mass” crusade. The remarkable thing was that no publicity preceded the crusade, and the only publicity during those days was word-of-mouth by those who came! One of the attendees in our conference three weeks ago gave me a vivid photo taken on the spot in the year 2000, which I will treasure for the remainder of my ministry on earth. I pray that many of those who made decisions carry yet today the “infallible proof” of “the witness of the Spirit” (Romans 8:16) in their own hearts that they were indeed born-again during those days. By the way, when all of those people made “decisions for Christ”, I immediately divided them into 25 groups and assigned them on the spot to be discipled by the 25 preachers I had been teaching all day long in the church building preceding our hurry to the open field—and those 25 preachers were still discipling them when I left well after darkness had covered the field hours later. On another occasion, in a South American country, I saw over 2300 people respond by professing first-time faith in Christ—miracle of miracles--in response to my own preaching! So, please understand me, I am not derogating crusade or “mass” evangelism in my assessment above. Nor am I depreciating social ministry in its place and proper alignment with true spiritual ministry. Nor soul-winning; anyone who knows me knows that I have a passion for telling any available person about Life in Christ and the possibility and necessity of knowing Him.
A common adage in our society is that “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” Jesus did this, though it is obvious today that our “main thing” and His are not in alignment. They are simply not in agreement. Looking at our ministries compared to His, it is evident that we have replaced disciple-making with many other “good” things (such as crowd-ministry, institution-building, etc.), but emphasis on them shows a decided disagreement with Jesus as far as the “main main thing” is concerned. We all should know that there is a radical but subtle difference between a good idea and a God idea! Such action, apparently generated by seemingly good ideas, either reveals too little thought in reading the original instructions, too little devotion in pursuing those instructions, or too much “Madison Avenue wisdom” to take the slow path of one-to-one or one-to-small group (as per Jesus) reproduction and multiplication by building His kind of disciples. All of our substitutes fail when compared to His strategy! True disciple-making will finally outrun any other ministry procedure man can use, and far more quickly than most “big” ministry leaders think!