Discipling E-Book

Mark Dever

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Building Healthy Churches
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 132

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Before ascending to heaven, Jesus instructed his followers to "make disciples of all nations." But what does this command actually entail? What does it look like for Christians to care for one another's spiritual well-being and growth? In this introduction to the basics of discipling, veteran pastor and author Mark Dever uses biblical definitions and practical examples to show how Christians can help one another become more like Christ every day. The eighth volume in the 9Marks: Building Healthy Churches series, this short book explains how discipling should function in the context of the local church, teaching pastors and church leaders how to cultivate a culture of edification and growth in their congregations.

Leseprobe

Discipling: How to Help Others Follow Jesus

Copyright © 2016 by Mark Dever

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Dual Identity, inc.

Cover image: Wayne Brezinka for brezinkadesign.com

First printing 2016

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-5122-2

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-5125-3

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-5123-9

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-5124-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dever, Mark.

Discipling : how to help others follow Jesus / Mark

Dever.

1 online resource. —(9Marks: building healthy churches)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-4335-5123-9 (pdf) -- ISBN 978-1-4335-5124-6 (mobi) -- ISBN 978-1-4335-5125-3 (epub) -- ISBN 978-1-4335-5122-2 (hc)

1. Discipling (Christianity) I. Title.

BV4520          

253—dc23

2015034615

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

CONTENTS

CoverNewsletter Sign UpEndorsementsSeries ListTitle PageCopyrightSeries PrefaceIntroductionPART 1: WHAT IS DISCIPLING?  1 The Inevitability of Influence  2 Oriented toward Others  3 The Work of Discipling  4 Objections to DisciplingPART 2: WHERE SHOULD WE DISCIPLE?  5 The Local Church  6 Pastors and MembersPART 3: HOW SHOULD WE DISCIPLE?  7 Choose Someone  8 Have Clear Aims  9 Pay the Cost10 Raising Up LeadersConclusion by Jonathan LeemanAppendix: Books besides the Bible to Use in Discipling RelationshipsNotesScripture Index9 Marks—Building Healthy ChurchesOther Books in SeriesBack Cover

SERIES PREFACE

The 9Marks series of books is premised on two basic ideas. First, the local church is far more important to the Christian life than many Christians today perhaps realize.

Second, local churches grow in life and vitality as they organize their lives around God’s Word. God speaks. Churches should listen and follow. It’s that simple. When a church listens and follows, it begins to look like the One it is following. It reflects his love and holiness. It displays his glory. A church will look like him as it listens to him.

So our basic message to churches is, don’t look to the best business practices or the latest styles; look to God. Start by listening to God’s Word again.

Out of this overall project comes the 9Marks series of books. Some target pastors. Some target church members. Hopefully all will combine careful biblical examination, theological reflection, cultural consideration, corporate application, and even a bit of individual exhortation. The best Christian books are always both theological and practical.

It’s our prayer that God will use this volume and the others to help prepare his bride, the church, with radiance and splendor for the day of his coming.

INTRODUCTION

For years my wife has had to endure my reluctance to ask for directions. You see, I know myself to be gifted with a natural sense of direction! Of course, that means my confidence sometimes outpaces my knowledge of the right way. As she says about me, “Always confident, sometimes right.”

I am not alone in wanting to plow my own furrow. People love Robert Frost’s words, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Henry David Thoreau remarked, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” And William Ernest Henley famously declared, “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

It’s not just the poets and writers who love their independence. The population at large is disengaging from their clubs, civic associations, and local churches, says Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone. The now-common sight of family members texting friends while ignoring each other at the dinner table explains Sherry Turkle’s title Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. And more and more people are choosing to live alone, notes Eric Klinenberg in Going Solo.1

Klinenberg writes,

In 1950, for instance, only 4 million Americans lived alone, and they accounted for less than 10 percent of all households. Today, more than 32 million Americans are going solo. They represent 28 percent of all households at the national level; more than 40 percent in cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Denver, and Minneapolis; and nearly 50 percent in Washington D.C. and Manhattan, the twin capitals of the solo nation.2

And this trend is not only in America. In Stockholm, Sweden, 60 percent of all households have just one occupant, according to Klinenberg.3

What’s going on? Klinenberg finds that in many places residents increasingly value space less and nearness to amenities—stores, restaurants, and gyms—more. The singletons, as he calls them, are reshaping everything to be more convenient to them. Communal commitments, however, must be detachable and temporary.

Today is the day of iPhones and iPads, iTunes and—let’s just say—the whole i-life. But is there any space in the i-life for the we-life of Christianity?

At the heart of Christianity is God’s desire for a people to display his character. They do this through their obedience to his Word in their relationships with him and with each other. Therefore he sent his Son to call out a people to follow him. And part of following the Son is calling still more to follow the Son. Then, in their life together, these people display the we-life of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Together they demonstrate God’s own love, holiness, and oneness.

His Son therefore gave this last command before ascending to heaven: go and make disciples (Matt. 28:19). The lives of these people, in other words, should be dedicated to helping others follow Jesus.

That’s the working definition of discipling for this book: helping others to follow Jesus. You can see it in the subtitle. Another way we could define discipling might be: discipling is deliberately doing spiritual good to someone so that he or she will be more like Christ. Discipleship is the term I use to describe our own following Christ. Discipling is the subset of that, which is helping someone else follow Christ.

The Christian life is the discipled life and the discipling life. Yes, Christianity involves taking the road less traveled and hearing a different drummer. But not in the way that Frost and Thoreau meant. Christianity is not for loners or individualists. It is for a people traveling together down the narrow path that leads to life. You must follow and you must lead. You must be loved and you must love. And we love others best by helping them to follow Jesus down the pathway of life.

Is this how you’ve understood Christianity, and what it means to be a Christian?

WHAT IS A DISCIPLE?

Before we can disciple others, we must become disciples. We must make sure we are following Christ.

What is a disciple? A disciple is a follower. You can do that by following someone’s teaching from afar, like someone might say he follows the teaching and example of Gandhi. And being a disciple of Christ means at least that much. A disciple of Jesus follows in Jesus’s steps, doing as Jesus taught and lived. But it means more than that. Following Jesus first means that you have entered into a personal, saving relationship with him. You have been “united with Christ,” as the Bible puts it (Phil. 2:1, NIV). You have been united through the new covenant in his blood. Through his death and resurrection, all the guilt of sin that is yours becomes his, and all the righteousness that is his becomes yours.

Being a disciple of Christ, in other words, does not begin with something we do. It begins with something Christ did. Jesus is the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep (John 10:11). He loved the church and therefore gave himself up for her (Eph. 5:25). He paid a debt that he didn’t owe, but that we owe, and then he united us to himself as his holy people.

You see, God is good, and he created us as good. But each of us has sinned by turning away from God and his good law. And because God is good, he will punish our sin. The good news of Christianity, however, is that Jesus lived the perfect life we should have lived, and then he died the death we should die. He offered himself as a substitute and sacrifice for everyone who will repent of their sin and trust in him alone. This is what Jesus called the new covenant in his blood.

So Christian discipleship begins right here with the acceptance of this free gift: grace, mercy, a relationship with God, and the promise of life eternal.

How do we accept this gift and unite ourselves to him? Through faith! We turn away from our sins and follow after him, trusting him as Savior and Lord. At one point in his ministry, Jesus turned toward a crowd and said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).

Our discipleship to Christ begins when we hear those two words and obey them: “Follow me.”

Friend, if you would become a Christian, regardless of how any other teacher you have heard puts it, listen to Jesus. He says that being a Christian involves denying yourself, taking up your cross, and following him. The fundamental response to God’s radical love for us is for us to radically love him.

To be a Christian means to be a disciple. There are no Christians who are not disciples. And to be a disciple of Jesus means to follow Jesus. There are no disciples of Jesus who are not following Jesus. Ticking a box on a public opinion poll, or sincerely labeling yourself with the religion of your parents, or having a preference for Christianity as opposed to other religions—none of these things make you a Christian. Christians are people who have real faith in Christ, and who show it by resting their hopes, fears, and lives entirely upon him. They follow him wherever he leads. You no longer set the agenda for your own life; Jesus Christ does that. You belong to him now. “You are not your own,” Paul says, “You were bought with a price” (see 1 Cor. 6:19–20). Jesus is not just our Savior—he is our Lord.

Paul explained it this way: “And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Cor. 5:15 NIV). What does it mean to die to self and live for him? Don Carson has said, “To die to self means to consider it better to die than to lust; to consider it better to die, than to tell this falsehood; than to consider it better to die than to . . . [you name the sin].”

The Christian life is the discipled life. It starts by becoming a disciple of Christ.

WHY DISCIPLE?

But the Christian life is also the discipling life. Disciples disciple. We follow the one who calls people to follow by calling people to follow. Why do we do this? For the sake of love and obedience.

Love. The motive for discipling others begins in the love of God and nothing less. He has loved us in Christ, and so we love him. And we do this in part by loving those he has placed around us.

When a lawyer asks Jesus what the greatest commandment is, Jesus begins by answering, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). What God wants most of all is for all of you to love him—all your ambitions and motives, your desires and hopes, your thinking and reasoning, your strength and your energy, all of this informed and purified and disciplined by his Word.

In fact, the comprehensiveness of your devotion to God will be demonstrated by your love for those made in God’s image. The lawyer may have asked for one command, but he got two: “The second,” said Jesus, “is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (v. 31). To omit the second command is to miss the first. Love for God is fundamental to love for neighbor. And love for God must express itself in love for neighbor. It completes the duty of love.

God’s love for us starts a chain reaction. He loves us, then we love him, then we love others. John captures all this: “We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:19–21).

Any claim to love for God that does not show itself in a love for neighbor is a love of a false god, another form of idolatry. In these verses Jesus and John reconnect some of the links broken at the fall.

Discipling others—doing deliberate spiritual good to help them follow Christ—demonstrates this love for God and others as well as anything.

Obedience. But tied to our love is our obedience. Jesus taught, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15; see also 14:23; 15:12–14). And what has he commanded? “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:19–20). Part of our obedience is leading others to obedience.

Jesus’s final command was not to urge his disciples to armed resistance to Rome, or seek revenge on those who killed him. Rather, Jesus looked at his followers, and told them to make disciples, not just be disciples.

Jesus makes no distinction between those to whom this commission was given, and those to whom it wasn’t given. He promises his presence to all Christians, as Pentecost would soon show. And that promise extends to the end of the ages, long beyond the apostles’ lives. Throughout the rest of the New Testament, all Christians would undertake this work according to their abilities, opportunities, and callings. This Great Commission is given to all those who would be disciples of Jesus. This command is given to every believer at all times.