Recently, Pastor Greg Mohr taught a message on discipleship at my church and it blessed many of us who were in attendance. Greg said many churches have settled for having great services and making converts, while neglecting our primary mission to make disciples. A disciple is a spiritual son or daughter who comes to a full place of maturity. This person isn’t just born again, they actually live like Jesus. Click here for the full message.
Ironically, Greg shared many things I’ve been teaching regularly about discipleship over the last year. As he spoke, God confirmed to me we are on the right track as a church and we need to continue our focus on discipleship. With that thought in mind, I am writing a series of articles about “How To Make Disciples” over the next several weeks. My goal is to help you become a disciple and learn how to disciple others.
The first step in discipling anyone is building a healthy relationship with them. All ministry comes out of the overflow of healthy relationships. The main idea I want you to get from this article is it takes time to build healthy relationships. To illustrate, I want to look at Jesus’s ministry to see how He went about making disciples.
In Matthew 4:19-21 Jesus called to Peter, James, John, and Andrew and said, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Years ago I heard a famous minister share a message about hearing the voice of God. He said when the Holy Spirit speaks we need to follow Jesus. He won’t always give us the whole picture of what He’s asking us to do. We have to know the voice of God and follow or otherwise we’ll miss out.
While I agreed with the minister’s premise that we need to follow when the Holy Spirit tells us to, it also bothered me because what if a person isn’t sure its the Holy Spirit speaking to them? How did Peter and John know it was the Holy Spirit speaking through Jesus and telling them to follow? Jesus was asking them to lay down everything and that was really risky.
The implication to us is, how do we know if it is God speaking to us to follow Him? In the context of this article, how do we know if it is God telling us to be someone’s disciple or to disciple a particular person? What if it is just our own thoughts or even worse, what if the devil is deceiving us about someone? Valid questions right?
Here’s the cool thing. God is never in a hurry and if we have a right heart He wants to confirm His will to us. 1 John 4:1 tells us to test the spirits. This means we shouldn’t automatically believe everyone who says to follow them and we don’t have to ask someone to be our disciple the first time we get a thought it might be a good idea to disciple them. We can test the spirits. Jesus’s disciples were able to do this with Him. Look at John 1:29-37:
Interestingly, if you read the rest of John 1, Jesus immediately invited the disciples over to His house and they stayed all day. I have no clue what they talked about, but for the purpose of this article, I’m not sure it matters. The point is Jesus spent time with them and got to know them and the disciples got to know Jesus. Remember, healthy relationships take time to build.
After all of these events Jesus went into the wilderness to fast and pray and be tempted by the devil for 40 days. This is recorded in Matthew 4:1-12, Mark 1:12-13, and Luke 4:1-13. John is the only one of the four gospel writers who did not record about the temptation. What’s interesting is when you put all of the gospel accounts together, Jesus immediately had an initial meeting with the disciples after His baptism, which John 1 records, but afterward He left for 40 days before returning to call them to follow Him in Matthew 4:19-21.
It appears that after their initial meeting in John 1, Jesus gave these men time to process everything that happened. We don’t know what they talked about while He was gone or if they got out parts of the Old Testament and began to compare prophecies about the Messiah with Jesus. I can only speculate as to what happened, but the point I want to make is Jesus gave them time to process. Healthy relationships take time to build and they aren’t forced.
When Jesus appeared to the disciples again in Matthew 4, they knew who they were being asked to follow. He had already demonstrated who He was to them, at least to some extent. Relationships take time to build and we don’t have to rush the process. We need to take time to get to know people and let them get to know us before we endeavor to disciple them. During this process we should look for hunger, faithfulness, and test those we are inviting to follow us. This helps ensure we have the right people following us and we are in a relationship God is building.
I hope this article has provided insight and help you as you endeavor to disciple others. If you’d like to learn more, check out this message I taught at Grace Life Church.
