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Therefore go and make people from all the nations into "talmidim" (disciples), immersing them into the reality of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you." Matt.28: 19-20 These words of the Master have been the driving force for centuries of evangelism in church history. Yet some two thousand years after they were spoken, we find ourselves in a world in which Islam is the fastest growing religion and the claim can hardly be made that the ‘whole world has been evangelized’ - at least not in the way Yeshua commanded. Perhaps it is time to take a fresh look at exactly what He said at the very end of His time on this earth. These words were spoken by a Jewish Messiah to his Jewish disciples. They were spoken by One who had lived a perfectly obedient life in keeping with the Torah, which His Father had delivered to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Those who followed Him also lived by the same Torah and knew nothing of the westernized and gentilized style of Christianity that we have become accustomed to. They worshipped in the synagogue on Saturday. They ate according to the dietary commandments. They understood that their relationship with the Holy One was a lifestyle of disciplined obedience to God’s ways and to His principles. And they had learned from the Master that unless their obedience sprang from a heart of love and joy at bringing pleasure to their God, their works had no value. They were disciples. The word disciple means a student under discipline; someone who is changing their lifestyle. A disciple is a person who recognizes their absolute need to alter anything and everything about their life that does not comply with the dictates of a holy God and who sets his course to do that very thing with God’s grace. A disciple is one who is constantly changing, growing and maturing. By contrast, much of our evangelism, if we will be honest, has produced ‘believers’ but not disciples. We have called people to an altar to repeat a formulated prayer and then told them when they did that they were ‘saved’. And many of them left the altar with no idea of what that meant! Dietrich Bonfoeffer said some 50 years ago: "Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of the church." When we preach grace without price; grace without cost; a cheap covering for sin without godly repentance, without even requiring the desire to be set free from sin, we do NOT preach the Gospel; we preach an easy-believism which does not fulfill the Great Commission. Yes, grace is a free gift of God but it is not cheap. It is costly. True grace introduced into your life will cost you your life if it is properly understood and taught. It will cost you your selfishness, your rebellion, your stubbornness. Why? Because the true grace, which comes from God, produces this: ‘If any man be in Messiah, he is a new creature. Behold old things pass away and all things become new.’ THIS is what receiving the grace of salvation is supposed to effect. If a demonstratable change cannot be seen in the person’s life, we have every biblical reason to question whether or not a true experience has occurred, no matter how many tears were shed or how many words were prayed. An old Scottish preacher said it this way. "I’m not impressed with how much you cry at the altar, but how straight you walk when you leave the church." The commission was this: ‘Make disciples...’ The Lord explained exactly what He meant. ‘...teach them to obey all that I have commanded you." You see, for a disciple, obedience is not optional; it is not debatable; it is not heroic. It is the expected heart attitude... and it is required - if you want to be considered a disciple! We read in Mark 2:14 "...he arose immediately..." In Matthew 4: 19-22 these words are found, "...and immediately they left their nets and their father and followed..." Yeshua said in John 10:5, "My sheep follow My voice..." and in John 14:15 "If you love Me, keep (or obey) My commandments." The posture of a true disciple is the act of obedience to follow the Lord and His word, not simply a confession of faith. As a first step of discipleship, Levi had to leave his tax table, James and John had to leave their nets. They had to break with their past and cling ferociously to the Master. Being a disciple is not something you offer to God; it’s something He calls you to be. Faith and obedience must work together. Only he who truly believes is motivated to obey. And the one who obeys demonstrates that he really believes! Therefore, single-minded, uncompromising obedience to God’s commandments is the defining quality of the true disciple. The disciple lives by the conviction that his life is not his own; it is surrendered unconditionally to the Lord and Self is consigned to the posture of servanthood - permanently. Sacrifice is no stranger to the disciple but it is to the believer. "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his own cross and follow Me." The first word of this verse is critical - IF. It means each person must choose, but once you do, the die is cast. It’s for keeps! Being a disciple is a permanent lifestyle. It’s not here today and gone tomorrow. It governs every aspect of daily life and brings a joy to life that is a mystery to the unbeliever and foreign to the casual believer. So far, none of this has anything to do with ‘just saying a simple prayer at the altar.’ Whenever the Gospel has been watered down to an emotional uplift with no costly demands, it ceases to be the Gospel. Whenever the Gospel is reduced to a formula that promises ‘eternal happiness’ in an abstract future, but makes no demand for a holy lifestyle here on earth, it ceases to be the Gospel. You were never called to ‘get saved.’ You were called to be a disciple! Carefully studied, the verse we call the ‘Great Commission’ implies a number of things: 1) you build your own relationship with God first by which you become a mirror image of what Yeshua lived and taught which was a life of obedience to God’s commandments. Why is this first? Because you cannot give what you do not have. If you are not a disciple, you cannot make a disciple of anyone else. If you do not live a life of demonstratable and consistent obedience to the Word of God in a spirit of humility, you cannot hope to inspire that lifestyle in others. 2) Therefore in order to ‘make disciples’ there must be a relationship between you and the non-disciple. He or she must be able to see something in you that inspires them to want what you have. Without that you do not fulfill the Great Commission. Unbiblical evangelism has produced numbers on denominational newsletters but very few disciples overall. Therefore we are not seeing in our day what the contemporaries of the early church witnessed: "These are those who have turned the world upside down." Nowhere in the scripture are we commanded to make believers but if we examine our typical evangelism with an open heart and open mind we are forced to admit that this is in fact what we have done to a great extent. And in so doing, we really have not obeyed the ‘Great Commission.’
We hear the word and often consider it a synonym for ‘witnessing’, which it is not. So Go! If you are not a disciple, you may want to learn how to be one. |
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